


Settle For

by amatchforyourmadness



Series: knit your soul to mine and i will turn you into a poem [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, But like most of the characters are only mentioned, College Student Sokka, Crazy Azula (Avatar), Heavy Angst, I do not take responsability for making people tearbend, M/M, Minor Aang/Katara, Minor Bato/Hakoda (Avatar), Minor Sokka/Suki, Only Suki Sokka and Zuko are really more prominent, Ozai Fucked Up A Perfectly Functional Son, Sad with a Happy Ending, Smoking, Zukka Updates On The 16th, poet Zuko, zukka - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:01:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26109844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amatchforyourmadness/pseuds/amatchforyourmadness
Summary: “Don’t be stupid.” He says, letting out a puff of smoke from his mouth that climbed high into the sky as if Zuko was a dragon or a house fire.“I can be very stupid, so you might need to be a little more specific.” Sokka quips, good-naturedly, reaches a hand in waiting for his turn with the cigarette, smiles up at the face that’s forever half-scowling but momentarily half-smiling at him, golden eyes indulgent and fond. “How should I go about not being stupid, Your Jerkiness?”He takes one last, long drag and passes it to Sokka’s waiting hands, calloused fingers brushing against calloused fingers.“Don’t settle for me.”(or the Modern AU in which Sokka flirts with a cute boy in a nowhere town during summer break and gets far more than he wagered for)
Relationships: Sokka/Suki (Avatar), Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: knit your soul to mine and i will turn you into a poem [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1932532
Comments: 83
Kudos: 285





	Settle For

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HicSuntDracones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HicSuntDracones/gifts).



> It's 1AM, I have spent a month obsessing over this fic, I have given Zuko and Sokka last names and I wrote some mad original poems (12 of them to be exact) so if you're to read it I wish dearly that you enjoy doing so as much as I did writing it.
> 
> Though, fair warning, you're getting into more than you bargained for.

* * *

> **Escape on Islander 36**  
>  _By Zuko Igarashi_
> 
> You couldn’t say, you shouldn’t stay,  
>  Fingers work out sailor knots.  
>  The sails flares open at last,  
>  The sea carries you from coast.  
>  You can’t say, you won’t stay,  
>  Wait until there’s some distance  
>  Then work the motor at full speed,  
>  The placid sea offers no resistance.  
>  You didn’t say, you didn’t stay  
>  And it might not last either way,  
>  But at least you got this far.   
>  To this city that isn’t even on the maps,  
>  Fortune favors you at last.  
>  No one here knows your name.  
>  If you were to pick a new one,  
>  You could be a whole new man.

* * *

Sokka stumbles in unsure feet, though the laugh that leaves his mouth is easy and uncontrollable, tastes bubbly and effervescent as champagne despite the fact all he has had so far into the night was cheap beer. His jaw hurts slightly from where the man punched him and the boy ahead of him has a busted lip, but between the two of them, Sokka knows very well he was not the one to handle the fight nor the one who thought on his feet to break that bottle on the so entitled ' _Boulder_ 's head.

Sokka stumbles behind this boy — he doesn't know his name and he looks as old as Sokka himself is, which causes him to frown and to commit himself to stop calling the boy a boy and start calling him a man — so Sokka stumbles behind this _man_ : it's some unholy hour of the night or of the patch of time between night and dawn where it's impolite to make noise, but the streets are dark and empty and the man tries to balance himself in the cobblestones and every time he laughs he throws his head back as if he's defying the skies and Sokka laughs along, thinking vaguely that he should put a price to that laugh because it fills him with some sense of overjoyed exhilaration fifteen shots of tequila couldn’t achieve.

Then he trips on the cobblestones again, which sends him in a desperate fight against gravity (several quick and wobbly steps, arms waving about like he’s trying to take flight, curses that would put Toph’s worst swearing sprees to shame) that is amusing to watch and which he eventually wins.

“You're drunk as fuck, dude.” Sokka says, snickering out a laugh instead of bellowing it out.

“I’m not drunk, I'm wasted.” The dark-haired being with golden eyes replies, halting on his steps for a moment and widening his eyes (both the good one and the one that barely survived under an unfortunate scar) in a delighted realization. “I know a drinking poem.” He whispers, so low Sokka struggles to hear the sentence and make out the words.

“What?”

“I know a drinking poem!”

Yes, that’s exactly what he had heard the first time, so he was right, but the one answer inside his mind still is:

“What?” This time distinctively less to the curious side of the word and leaning more to the judgmental one.

“Shhh. It's Yeats, show some respect.” He says, waving vaguely at his vague direction, like a snob and his face do a thing that makes him look way less like a snob — oh, no, _he’s pretty_ — and then spirits be good, he started talking again. “Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye. That’s all we shall know for truth before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh.”

No drunk man who almost just fell on his face should ever sound that smooth, but it would be Sokka’s luck to land himself being kicked out of a bar with one such man.

“Buy me another drink before you serenade me.” He shoots back, on principle, and grins to himself as the smoothness gives way to a pouty scowl — which is good because Sokka can handle scowls in a way he can't handle handsome mysterious men who recite poems as if they're love confessions.

“No one appreciates a good poem anymore." He says, sadly, hands reaching into his pockets, looking vaguely towards the sea peaking over the stone houses blocks ahead.

The left side of his face is turned to him now, the lamplights don’t do their job very well, so between their flickering glow and the moon he doesn’t know if the scar looks as bad as it seems or if that’s just a trick of shadows. The man tilts his head back, runs his hands through shaggy black hair, pulls it back just enough so he gets one good look at it: red, angry, encompassing his eye, half his cheek and the top of his ear and it must have hurt as all fuck to get.

It looks as bad as he feared it would, the shadows didn’t play any tricks — well, except of the one: the shadows had made him look angry, but it’s difficult to really look angry when one was (self-declaredly) wasted, laughing at the night-sky and flirting though poems.

Golden eyes look at him again as dark hair falls over his face, shielding most of the scar, and Sokka can’t remember seeing him pull a pack of cigarettes from his jeans, nor seeing him lit one but it’s one more unreliable source of light to see his face by. He steps closer before his brain can catch up to what his feet are doing, and the man arches a brow as if he’s sensing a shift that Sokka didn’t, leans against the steel bars that raise from the ground where cobblestones end and the grass of a park start.

“Do you smoke?” He asks.

Sokka doesn’t answer, just extends his hand, thinks he might take another one from the pack and light it for him, but instead he inhales smoke one more time, takes the cig from in-between his lips and offers it over to Sokka.

He’s 20 years old, not 14, but the gesture still looks intimate in a way he can’t explain.

He takes it, takes a drag of it and the man in font of him leans back to let more smoke out and high into the sky. His skin is really pale, it’s difficult not to wonder what his neck would look like with a hickey of his or two.

The cigarette trades hands again.

“You have a name?”

“Yes.” He says, scoffing softly as if that’s a stupid question (which, fine, it was, _everyone has a name_ ) and proceeds to not give it.

“Uh…” Sokka arches a brow, gestures vaguely with the cig after the tiny roll of nicotine switched hands yet again, like cool people do in old movies, leaving a trail of smoke in front of him that leads back to his mouth. “Plan on giving it to me anytime soon?"

“What for?”

“For me to call you by it?”

“For you to know me by it.” Ah, there he goes, sounding like a fucking snob again as he plucks the cigarette from his fingers. “You can call me anything. It doesn't really matter, it's just some letters strung together we give some meaning. You could call me, I don't know, Lee.”

”I'll indulge you.” He says, because what else would he do, now that he’s already aching with curiosity and something else that's a little more than just mere interest. “So, _Lee_ , do you live nearby?”

His laugh rings again, but this time he’s not challenging the stars because there's a glimmer to narrowed eyes that matches the curve to his lips. The cig dangles from his fingers and he pulls his shoulders back as if he’s playing at what he thinks confidence looks like.

“I thought I had to buy you a drink before I serenaded you again.”

Sokka smirks the sort of grin that is made of double meanings and innuendos, leans by him and stretches an arm behind his back and Lee’s eyes follow the movement knowingly, like a sailor who faced too many storms to not know how to tie proper knots or a man who knows very well this is a dance for two and the next steps too, trailing the skin of his bare arms all the way up his shoulder until his gaze flickers to his face, or the specific spot of his face where his mouth still bares just enough teeth to be charming.

“I’m not asking you to serenade me.”

Golden eyes leave his lips to look at his eyes (he doesn’t look angry at all, right now, he just looks vulnerable), then flicker back to his lips for longer than an innocent glance would. If he leans for a kiss now, Sokka would be more than happy to oblige him; his lips looked soft and he really was beautiful.

“We're better off at your house.” Lee declares after a thoughtful pause, through a mouthful of rising smoke, tapping the lit end of the cigarette against the metal bar he had been leaning on. “I live on a boat.”

Sokka leaves the matter of asking absurd questions in the morning; the kissing, however, he indulges in right now. Keeps indulging as they make their way through the streets, laughing softly against each other's mouth, all the way up his stairs, unlocking the door to his rented flat and pressing not-Lee against the wall.

He was right, his lips were soft.

* * *

It was a bad idea, leaving the questions for the morning. For a multitude of reasons, really, but chief among them stand that: a) he keeps underestimating just how useless hangovers render him and b) he’s not a morning person in any capacity.

 _Lee_ , it seems, was very much a morning person given that Sokka had woken up to an emptier bed than he had slept on the night before. In addition to being an early riser it would seem he’s also a great cook, given the crepes in the counter (how did he even scrape crepes from the deserted land that are his cupboards?) and the sort of guy that did his walk of shame in the morning without first issuing a goodbye — which, _rude_.

Sokka grumbled to himself, after walking in dismay towards the plate and flopping on one of the stools by the counter to eat his unjustly delicious crepes. The least he could do was leave a note (‘ _nice fuck, Sokka_ ’ or ‘ _last night was fun, guy I don’t really remember_ ’ but that could be Sokka’s way of doing things talking), maybe a phone number if he had done something royally right the night before.

Well, there went nothing, he guessed.

He unlocks his phone and refrained from physically wincing away of the sheer amount of messages unanswered: 67 from Katara and 10 missed calls because she still thought she had to act like mom, 24 from Hakoda with wishes of a good break and a comprehensible guide of want not to do (getting a girl pregnant included), three texts from Aang wishing him a good time, a ‘get drunk, get laid and break the law’ from Toph (which he did accomplish 2/3 on the first day, she would be so proud) and one random picture of a cabbage from Bato with no context at all (he loved that man).

After seeing to that all the ( _too many texts_ , Katara should learn from Toph and Bato and he cannot believe Toph and Bato are role model at something) texts dutifully answered aside, he washes the plate and moves to unpack his bag, still there from the day before when he had arrived and pulled the essentials out — by which he meant the hair products — to set up int the bathroom, resolving to leave the shirts on the duffle bag to be picked and pulled out at a whim and closed the closet door on it.

It’s sometimes after 7 when he hits the streets, slightly-crumpled clothes and all charming confidence, decided to try a new bar than the one from the night before. If the guy didn’t want anything to do with him, Sokka wouldn’t run after him, he had plenty of self respect thank you.

Plenty of self respect and plenty of curiosity too, as evidenced by how he couldn’t help pass by said bar of the night before without opening the door to peek inside the room, glancing at the faces, looking for a familiar one. It’s too early to be properly crowded, even with summer break from college and the half a dozen weird ass students as him that fancy spending their two to three weeks in a town that’s mostly composed of grumpy people with hands toughened by fishing nets and fingertips cut by hooks, but with an absurd number of bars to keep the monotony from killing them out of boredom.

But there was no known face on the bar and Sokka did a poor job of pushing down the disappointment, and it was the same at the second and third bar he opened the door but didn’t walk in until he resolved to have some actual self-respect and walk in the fourth bar without looking for a man that probably hadn’t been that interested to begin with and-

“Son of a bitch.” Sokka lets out with a breath, shaking his head.

There he was, the dark-haired man with golden eyes, leaning over the bar, rolling a half-empty glass of firewhiskey in his grip leisurely and staring at it under the too-dark light of the bar.

He’s walking towards him before he can tell himself not to.

“Lee, was it?” He greets, leaning against the bar from his left side and wincing slightly when the man startles enough to almost jump from his seat.

“What?”

“Your name? Or so you said.”

“You did insist on a name. I suppose we can stick with it.” He says, nonchalantly, waving a waiter closer. “What’s your poison of the night?”

“A Blue Lagoon should do.” He says with a shrug, watches him for a moment as he asks the bartender for his drink and a Red Lotus for himself before tilting his head to the side, indulgently amused. “You don’t remember my name, do you?”

The man was sent spluttering immediately.

“Of course I do.” He said, sounding personally attacked in the sort of way Sokka should be, because he wasn’t the one that forgot his fake name. “It’s Sokka. I’m not a dick.”

Oh, so he _did_ remember. The pleasant feeling to his chest cavity and the smile to his lips had something to do with that realization, but he perks up instead of breaking his head trying to give it a name.

“You did leave before I woke up.” He points out, to which Lee promptly argues back:

“I _made you crepes_." He narrows his good eye at him. " _Then_ I left before I woke up.”

“Those were great crepes.” He concedes, because Sokka is a sensible man and always concedes when the matter is food.

“I’m a passable cook.”

“My sister’s a passable cook, you have to be at the very least a very good cook to pull what you pulled out on that kitchen.”

Their drinks are laid on the bar. He reaches for his, electric blue, and Lee claims the blood red one. Sokka offers a silent toast, golden eyes appraise him and lips twitch upwards, but he joins in. Glass clinks against glass, cool alcohol burns down their throats.

Talking is easy when he isn’t shit faced enough to be speaking in poems or tripping on pebbles in the street. Getting answers, it turns out, is noticeably harder.

“Buy me another drink before you interrogate me.” He answers, an echo of yesterday’s words that has him ordering another red alcohol based concoction with a laugh.

They have small talk until the new drink is placed in front of Lee and Sokka arches a brow, a silent inquiry of either he’s allowed to ask questions or not. He takes the eye roll as a yes.

“What’s your name?”

“Lee.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Lee.”

“Will you ever tell me?”

“Will you ever stop asking for it?”

Sokka grunts non-committingly and Lee drinks to that.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty one.”

“You have one year over me. Where do you go to college?”

“Nowhere, I’ve graduated two years ago.”

“Oh, really? What Major?”

“Poetry.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“What for? You’re so good at asking questions.”

Sokka pouts and puts on a valiant attempt of pretending he is not going to volunteer the information if Lee doesn’t ask for it. Lee drinks his red liqueur and doesn’t break eye contact. It was a good three minutes.

“Civil Engineering in Ba Sing Se University. Are you happy now?”

“I’m never happy.”

“You’re making it very hard for me to kiss you again.”

“No, I’m not.”

“No, you’re not.”

Lee laughs, Sokka smiles and finds out that his red drink tastes acutely of lychee liqueur.

“Well, you first then.” He whispers against his lips, so smug he could slap his face “I think I can still remember the way.”

The next morning Sokka would wake up in an empty bed again and feel just the proper amount of dejection as he dragged himself out of bed.

Well, up until the moment he dragged his feet towards the kitchen: a plate of waffles this time, surrounded by bags of groceries and a small note near his plate with the name of a bar and a time.

‘PS: No matter how many times you praise me to the Spirits in bed, I cannot perform miracles when it comes to food. Buy some decent groceries.’

He laughed and felt the right amount of fucked over the endearing mystery Lee posed.

* * *

> **Dragon Hunts**  
>  By Zuko Igarashi
> 
> There’s a horrified wonder in their eyes,  
>  A hushed excitement silences the crowd,  
>  ‘They’ve shot them from the sky’, they say,  
>  And keep watching their screens, the skies.  
>  It won’t take long, his wings are gone,  
>  elated heartbeats measure the time:  
>  ‘Keep watching’, they say, ‘anytime now’.
> 
> Above, a red streak withers against the clouds,  
>  It’s never been seen before, not until now.  
>  They haven’t seen the blue one be dragged away  
>  Abandoned all the same in the same old house,  
>  After having lost, been sedated and bound.  
>  All of them cheer as one, however,  
>  as that one dragon falls to the ground.

* * *

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” He says even though the proof is right there and lets out a startled laugh.

He thought for certain that Lee-who-was-definitely-not-called-Lee was either joking or bullshitting when he said he lived on a boat, told him as much too, but he’s a man-shaped box of endless surprises and on the fifth time they meet in the third different bar, he smiles as they leave without drinking anything, asks if he gets seasick easily and guides him to the docks.

“I did tell you.” He says, as if it’s perfectly normal to live on a damn boat — _The Jasmine Dragon_ , painted in fading gold paint on it’s side — and promptly jumping aboard as if he was raised in between sails, which is unfair, because Sokka’s father is an occasional-fisherman-full-time-navy-officer that takes him along every time he misses the sea and Sokka's legs still need some getting used to the sway of the waves when they take their yearly fishing trips. “Not my fault you didn’t believe me.”

Lee holds out his hand to help him aboard. Sokka realizes with baited breath that he’s falling, and fast, and not in the way Lee’s arms can pull him up from as he smiles, steadying Sokka over the housesailboat’s deck.

It took a held back chucle and an arching brow, golden eyes flickering between their hands and his face, for Sokka to realize he must have been holding it longer than it would be normal or cool and not totally embarrassing. His cheeks burned slightly but he released his hand, looking away and returning his courtesy of not laughing at Sokka’s sappiness by pretending he didn’t see the pink dusting over cheeks paler than his.

“So… welcome to my home?” Lee tried after a moment of silence, waving at the expanse of the boat in such a self-awkward it almost physically pained Sokka, hands drifting to run through his hair. “Uh… And try not to fall over the edge of the boat while I get us something? Can you manage that?”

“Oi, show me some respect.” Sokka argues, easily falling back into banter, hiding his embarrassment with smugness. “I’m a sealhound myself, you know?”

Lee takes the bait willingly and Sokka takes the sideways smile he offers happily.

“My apologies, sailor Sokka.” He says, dry and mocking in the way that would be offensive if coming from anyone else.

“Get us the bottle and I might forgive you.”

He scoffs but turns around, vanishing down though what he can only assume were stairs into whatever kind of house Sokka was stepping over right now. He takes the time to look around appreciatively at the boat; it’s a spirits-damned beautiful boat, all reddish brown wood and gold details. Bato would kill or die for one.

“Will we need glasses?” Lee’s voice carries from under the deck.

“We kissed already, and did more than kissed too. I’m sure drinking from the same bottle won’t be a problem.”

Sokka doesn’t hear the snicker, but he knows Lee snickered, can almost picture it in his mind’s eyes and then he’s smiling again like an idiot because that’s what cute boys do to him. His fingers brush against the wood, inspecting more details of the sailboat as he walks towards the pulpit with more balance than he had under Lee's golden gaze and with fond memories of Dad's _Seas the Day_ on the back of his mind: the bad puns, the salt air breeze, Katara's delighted giggles as water splashed on them, Dad's hand on his shoulder and Bato's ruffling his hair and dinners of roasted fish. The Jasmine Dragon is slightly smaller than their old fishing boat, but five times more well built. 

“I do not have drugs hidden on my boat, officer, stop looking for them.”

Sokka turns around and Lee has already climbed the stairs, stands leaning against the mast behind him, bottle of an amber liquid in his hands and an indulgent look to his face. Tui’s light frames him gently and he looks less mysterious then than he ever has before and younger than his older-than-time eyes would suggest.

“O Captain, My Captain!” Sokka says, letting out all the drama in him. “What booze do you bring me?”

“Brandy.” He deadpans, eyes sparkling with amusement, cracks the lid open and offers it to him. “The Captain dies on that one.”

“What?” Sokka asks with a frown, taking the bottle and tilting it back, until there’s the rich taste of expensive alcohol in his tongue and the pleasant burning sensation to his throat.

“But I, with mournful tread, walk the deck my Captain lies, fallen cold and dead _._ ” Lee recites flawlessly and leaves Sokka to wonder if there’s a poem the guy _doesn’t know_. “The Captain dies.”

“Well, then do please refrain of dying in the deck tonight. It would be a bad look on me, unfortunate for you and a terrible mood killer.” He asks, passing the bottle back to Lee’s hands who just shrugged playfully, in the way that made no promises. “Nice boat, by the way. Man, my dad would weep over this.” It’s impossible to miss when Lee’s nose scrunched up, but not from the drink. Sokka hesitates, ponders where to ask before: “Sore subject?”

“I would appreciate if we could avoid family talks, yes.”

Fair enough. He takes the offered bottle.

“Daddy issues then?” He says before he can take his swig, because he’s an idiot and he doesn’t know when to _shut up_ , and by Tui and La take it as a joke—

“Not enough to call you daddy in bed, so don’t even try.” Lee says, snatching the bottle for himself before he can even drink (which, again, fair enough and it’s better of a reaction than he thought he would get) and leaning back against the mast with a smug guardedness to him.

“Not my brand of kinkiness either.”

“Praise Agni.”

“I will, if you pass me the bottle.”

Lee raises an unimpressed brow, but complies.

“So, you wanted to know the boat, I showed you the boat.” Brandy trickles down Sokka’s throat. “You wanted to drink, here we are.” The bottle switches hands again, fingers brush and it’s the same spark of electricity. “What else should we do tonight?”

“Bold suggestion here, but hear me out: each other.” Sokka drawls out the last words in what he thinks is a seductive voice, but that gets Lee to snorts brandy through his nose, which proves to be almost as painful as the matter that he can’t quite breathe from how hard he’s laughing and Sokka isn’t much help either, because he’s crouched over him, trying to ask questions and losing to the urge to laugh halfway through them.

“One day I will not fuck you solely on the account of a bad pick up line.” The man declares, breathless, sat back on the wooden deck, lips still pulled into a smile.

“Is this day today, tho?” He asks, because it is an important question regarding this night’s plans and he did just make him blow alcohol out his nose but Lee doesn’t bother with words, just kisses him.

They stumble blindly down the four-steps-stairs, his eyes closed and his hands holding onto Lee’s shoulder and his hair in absolute trust, because he should know the layout of this place better than him. Not that it’s hard: it’s a one-room home, with the thinnest lines in the world setting apart bed from bathroom from kitchen.

It seems unfair that his bed is better than his, but then their shirts are on the floor and the bed is really not a problem at all.

* * *

When he wakes up, Lee is making breakfast three or four steps away from him, in the kitchen to the left side of this one-room house crammed inside a sailboat.

Sokka smiles sleepily and finds himself content to remain under blankets, face pressed against the pillow, merely watching him (or at least his back) and memorize the expanse of his skin under daylight, mapping with his eyes where his fingers left marks: the waist Sokka had held on so tight as he was straddled that he half-feared he would end up bruising his bones, the red lines parallel to spine left behind as he urged him to go faster, his wrists from when he was the one on top and Lee was the one squirming and pleading to ‘ _move, fuck, just move_ ’.

“Plan on staying in my bed all day then?” The other man’s voice comes in a swoop, teasing and warm in the slight chill of the morning, to break him from the memories of last night and the ways he could make his voice break, head thrown back.

“It depends.” He says, stretching lazily and kicking the covers aside as the black-haired man turns to look at him over his shoulder, face all too fond and indulgent to remain unkissed for long but still Sokka works into disarming him just a little more with his charms, grins at him. “Would you charge me boat-rent?”

There it is: the soft snort, the shy head tilt that has chin meeting chest to hide the curve of a smile on his lips and the blush to his cheeks. Like someone taught him to hide his happiness, to be ashamed of the simple joys in life and uncertain of the affection given, and he will try and make him unlearn that with as many words and kisses as it takes.

“Wash the dishes for today and I will clear you debt.” He says and then he turns away, and Sokka can’t possibly have _that_ , so he fishes for his shorts and gets up to chase one more smile (maybe one more, and another one, and another, as many as he can elicit really—).

“Your everlasting kindness never ceases to amaze me, O Captain My Captain.”

Lee turns to look at him over his shoulder probably to sass him right back but Sokka’s quicker, wraps his arms around him from behind, kisses his cheek just to watch him blush before burying his own face on the crook of the other’s neck. Inside his mind he counts to nine patiently, an hesitant palm lays over his inter-wined hands at waist-high after the small lapse of time and he leans a little more against Sokka, already trusting him to brace more of his weight today than he did yesterday.

“Good morning.” He mumbles against his pulse point, relishes in feeling him shiver.

“Good morning to you too.” Lee answers, voice a lot softer than it usually is, and that would have been enough, like it had been the other times he had woken back in his flat with him — but today he gives him one more thing to warm his heart to the point of combustion: tilts his head to press his nose against Sokka’s disheveled hair and kisses the top of his head before murmuring. “There’s fresh coffee and a mug for you.”

He wants to keep him. Someone hand him the papers.

“A man after my own heart.”

Sokka has to pry his hands from him for multiple reasons, three of them food-related given that last time Lee burned breakfast because he couldn’t keep the neck-kissing to a minimum until the food was safe on plates, away from fire. Mug of coffee in hands, he inspects the poetry books in the shelves (the man has more books than he has changes of clothes, so there must be an appeal), all different sizes and worn out covers, brushes his digits carefully against printed names.

“For a Sunday morning, I would go with Seamus Heaney. Sloe Gin is one of my favorites.” Lee lays down a plate of french toast for him on the table at the corner, then reaches for a book, opens it on a page he seems to know by heart and that had it’s number worn down by repetitive handling before offering it back to Sokka, a spark of mischief to his eyes. “The clear weather of juniper darkened into winter. She fed gin to sloes and sealed the glass container.”

A smug smile adorns his face as he leans closer — it’s very similar to the shy one and not at all at the same time — absurdly self-satisfied, but he can’t begrudge him for either that or the smugness when he looks so fine with that pseudo self-confidence about him, when he smiles without hiding it.

“When I unscrewed it, I smelled the disturbed tart stillness of a bush rising through the pantry.” His too-warm hand lays over his equally bare chest, guides him back and Sokka lets himself be backed against the wall. “When I poured it, it had a cutting edge and flamed like Betelgeuse.” He leans closer and his eyes close in bliss when he steals a kiss Sokka would have given freely, whispers the last verse directly against his lips like a secret. “I drink to you, in smoke-mirled, blue-black sloes; bitter and dependable.”

Breathing. That’s a thing he needs, isn’t it? Does he really, though, if his brain has melted to paddy and his heart is beating loudly in his ears and his lips feel remarkably neglected now Lee is no longer kissing them? Where was this going again? Oh, yes. Breathing.

He looks too smug now, looking down at Sokka but not kissing Sokka, and if he’s not going to kiss him, that smugness is not allowed, because Sokka’s the smug one here.

“I refuse to believe you quoted all of that by memory.” He lets out, just to prove to himself that he can, that he’s still capable of rational thought no matter how stupidly good of a kisser Lee may be. “You must have cheated, read it somehow.”

“You doubt my skills. I must call for a duel to defend my honor. Today, that bed, sundown.”

He can’t help it; he laughs.

“You’re on.” Sokka replies, playfully, closing the book he still holds in hands. “How many poems about drinking do you know, anyways?”

“How many drinks are there?” Lee shrugs, arches his one good brow. “Would you rather I go through my smoking poems repertoire now?”

“For some variety, it’s worth a shot.”

Golden eyes narrow in defiance, the pads of his fingers caress Sokka’s jaw, tilt his head to one side, hot breath grazes his neck and his fingers graze over a book he doesn’t bother to pick up or open or hand to him. Instead he dives to press a kiss against the skin where neck meets shoulder — hey _, that’s Sokka’s move_ — sucks a bruise, bites gently and only then does he start:

“Smoking, by Elton Glasser.” Another bite and Sokka groans like he’s being choked - his hands are traveling south. “I like the cool and heft of it, dull metal on the palm—”

The only thing better than Lee’s voice, Sokka decides, back arching and hips buckling, is what requires it to stop.

* * *

> **Golden On The Edges**  
>  By Zuko Igarashi
> 
> The air caresses face, limbs and hair,  
>  The sun glows golden against skin,  
>  Lids half-closed, eyelashes graze cheeks,  
>  A little out of depth, drunk in salt air.
> 
> If his mortal hands could reach past flesh  
>  To find past the chest cavity a beating heart,  
>  It would be glistening to the touch,  
>  Stain his fingertips red and golden,  
>  The firm pulse lets out words in morse code  
>  ‘Welcome to the tender corners of a soul’.

* * *

“I met a boy” He tells Katara over the phone, smoking one of the cigarettes Lee left behind the last time he slept in his place, three days ago but he can still catch the smell of him in his sheets.

“Sokka.” She says, in the tone she uses only to warn him to be careful when he’s already walking towards trouble, still harboring the hope he’ll listen and turn around.

“Don’t worry about it.” He says, which is code for ‘ _don’t bother, I’m in too deep_ ’, adds a softly whispered: “He’s nice.” that teases an involuntarily smile from his lips.

There’s a sigh from her end of the line.

“Tell me about him.”

He collects information about Lee, like he’s a puzzle he’s desperately trying to figure out while he can: his hair is soft, he’s warm, he lives in a sailboat, he won’t talk about his family, he won’t tell him his name. He doesn’t like to drink but he does it to forget even though he’s no good at forgetting, but he does like to smoke, and he likes Sokka, or at least he acts like he does.

The left side of his face is leathery with the scar that spans from his ear to almost his nose, he does a weird thing every time Sokka touches it: shivers and tenses, then breathes in and out, forces himself to relax and leans against his palm. He has the words _‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul’_ carved on the wood directly above and against his bed, it’s most definitively a poem and he carved it himself with a kitchen knife. He loves poetry and he has napkins and scraps of paper hidden in a kitchen drawer that he thinks Sokka didn’t notice, covered in ink and cursive writing and pieces of rhymes and he kept the ridiculous drawing Sokka made of him that one morning as a joke and put it up in the fridge.

Above all else, Sokka could fill notebooks with observations and clues and statements, but no matter how many things he knows about him, he doesn’t know him, not really. So he settles for small goals: focuses on discovering his name.

In the end, it’s not Sokka’s detective work that does it, but alcohol and only two bottles of it at that instead of their bar outing’s customary six or last night’s two, or the day before that's three — the more they meet and the more time they spend together, the more the number of the bottles go down and the more his tongue loosens and it doesn’t make much sense, in the cause and effect side of things.

Here’s what happens: he drinks to forget except he’s not really trying to forget, sprawled on the cushioned sheets he threw over the ship’s deck so they can bathe in the last rays of sun and point out all the constellations they can name, and they are trading stories and laughter and almost throw one of the cushions overboard and then he lets out his name while ranting through a tale about his Uncle.

“It was so stupid! It was! No, look—” He says, wheezing slightly and trying to go though his lack of breath to tell the rest with the same stubbornness he dedicated to everything else. “He would always use this ridiculous proverbs that don’t make any sense, right? So there I am: freaking out on the bathroom floor, sat against the door so he can’t come in, regretting 16 whole years of my life and he goes ‘ _In a crisis, the devil eats flies, Zuko_ ’.” He says that in a deep voice that must either belong to one of those fat wise characters on chosen one movies or his mysterious uncle named after food while Sokka feels his jaw go slack and eyes widen, bursting into a bark of startled laughter that has Lee’s face glow into a childish joy that creased the corner of his good eye. “Exactly! And I ask him ‘ _Uncle, what does that mean?!_ ’, but all he has to say is that it makes more sense in—”

He doesn’t realize what he did, Sokka thinks to himself in wonder, carefully controlling the muscles of his face as the other man gestured through his story more and more excited, showing more and more teeth, eyes sparkling with more than the setting sun or the stars peeking through the fabric of the night sky as they laid back over the cushions and Lee knocks over the mostly full bottle, clear liquid spilling over the side of the boat under his soft though creative curses and still he does not realize it. Sokka collects that scrap too, carefully over all the rest.

Eventually, he ropes him down and lays his head over his chest so he couldn’t try and get up for more absurd reasons. The stars were already out for over a hour, but they only remembered about them now.

Fingers point to the skies, voices recite all the names they knew of: _The Hunter’s Spear_ he says, _The Dancing Dragon_ Lee replies and _Kyoshi’s Fan_ and _The Crown of Kuei_ and _The Lionhawk of Paradise_ and _The Eastern Komodo Rino_ and _The Water Bearer_ and _The Phoenix Tail_ and _The Sea Goat_. When those ran out, they moved to made up ones: _The Fat Pygmypuma_ and _Katara’s Foul Mood_ and _Mushi's Cup of Tea_ and _The Legendary Jasmine Dragon_ and _your smile_ — which should by all laws of flirting existent be too corny to work, but Sokka grew up on trashy romcoms and rewards him with the new constellation’s namesake and he still doesn’t realize it.

He stumbles out of the boat a couple hours later with the smile still insistent upon his lips and Lee ( _but he knows better, he knows his name now_ ) kissing him as if he doesn’t want him to go and as if he still doesn’t realize what he did.

“His name is Zuko.” He whispers, soft like a secret, giddy with the thrill of it and takes the cigarette to his lips.

* * *

His name was Zuko and he was a poet.

That should be no surprise given how two glasses of whiskey would see him rhyming his words and dangling from the side of the small boat to recite Yeats at the skies and Wilde to the seas; but here’s the catch: he was a famous one.

This weird, easy-to-love but not-easy-to-get man that smelt of smoke and motor oil and tasted of whiskey and spices, living in a boat and traveling the seaside that refused to speak of home or entertain the thought of staying longer than 'one more day' even though he had spent now over half of Sokka’s summer break and a whole week more than planned when faced with Sokka's pleading smile, was a famous poet with books published and enough money to buy himself a decent shirt or two but he had slept on his bed the night before, as if Sokka’s chest was a pillow, sighing softly when he ran his fingers through the black strands of his hair.

He feels winded. It doesn’t make any sense.

Lee’s real name was Zuko Igarashi and he was a famous poet. Spirits, a _Worldly Renowned_ one even, and his poems were _everywhere_ , in-between pictures of his seminars and pages on Wikipedia and the overflowing articles about his family and the mess it had been to arrest Oil Magnate Ozai.

There is a picture of a younger version of him, the beaming smile of last week’s breakfast on deck to his face and the left side of his face smooth as his right, hair pulled back in a neat topknot, his father’s hand in his shoulder and his own hand on his mother’s one. These are the people that made him the man he is, these are the people he won’t speak about.

His finger hovers the one headline that mention his poem that pops up above all the sensationalists titles — the gory ones of the raid in his family’s house, about his arrested father and his crimes, news about him with picture cards that show his shoulders hunched and his scared face turned to the ground and an old man’s arm around his arms shielding him from the cameras, speculations about his life and things that just remind him guiltily of ' _I don't want you to know me by it_ ' — and the page opens: there’s a brief introduction to the situation leading up to his disappearance ( _disappearance?_ ), with mentions of a note being left on his bed and read by his uncle finally bleeding into the said note’s title, in a larger font, and darker than the rest of the text.

 **A Note to Casual Vultures**  
The journals tell tales,  
Not all of them fully true,  
The camera flashes follow  
Those who are left around,  
It’s not hard, can’t be:  
There are only two of us now  
People tune in every night,  
Like watching animals on a zoo,  
Look at what the news are saying,  
What they think of this family,  
Look at what they think of you.  
And it is fair, that cannot be denied,  
But if one’s pain could be respected,  
Surviving might be easier this time.  
_\- Z.I_

 _Oh_. The cell phone is lowered to his chest and his breath leaves his chest, controlled as the prelude to a storm of thoughts and questions he can not answer for the life of him. _That was not what he had been looking for._

This was not what he had been looking for. He had been looking for a Twitter account and bad takes on popular movies, or a Facebook with embarrassing moments and awkward teenage-years-rebellion pictures, or an Instagram with moody shots of the sea but even with the thousands upon thousands of pictures the Internet has provided him with, none are there per his choice. The videos are not his, the paparazzi shots or the professional photos are not his, the hit pieces are not his, the gossip on the tabloids aren’t his, nothing of _his_ is in there.

Nothing, except for the poems.

The poems are the one reliable input Zuko has shared since he was sixteen apparently, and of course they must be poems, all fancy words and analogies that Sokka is going to have to link to articles, to figurative clippings of newspaper to understand what they mean, what they apply, what kind of life he led and what it did to him and, goddammit couldn't he just _talk_? Just _tell him_?

Of course he couldn't, he couldn't even tell him his name.

( _He had good reason not to_ ).

Sokka glances at the phone again. Half hopes the words will disappear or change if he double-checks the page wishing hard enough it would. It doesn’t.

He’s been gone for weeks, the first paragraphs says as much, and this article was posted over a month ago. How long had he been alone, sailing on that small nothing of a boat with as many bottles as he has books, not a phone or a computer anywhere like a tech dinosaur, or someone who’s purposefully keeping himself off the grid?

His mother and his Uncle would be worried, and at least one of those pictures had shown a sister too, younger than him. Didn’t Zuko care?

He had talked so much of his Uncle, just earlier that night, would he leave the old man months and months wondering where he is and either or not he’s safe?

Sokka could never disappear from Dad and Bato and Katara without sending word that he was alright for a week, least of all so many months and be okay enough to stop every two weeks for drinks, invent a new name every time he docks, fantasize a life that is not his.

Why?

He needs to understand him. He wants to.

Sokka holds the guilt down a little more forcefully _(_ it’s not any different from reading one of the books in his nightstand, is it?) and lets curiosity guide him to the _‘other works’_ linked by his name at the bottom.

* * *

> **Such Is A Childhood Home**  
>  By Zuko Igarashi
> 
> In these walls, there are words we cannot say,  
>  There are names we must learn to forget.  
>  There are creatures living in this house  
>  But they haven’t fed you to them yet.
> 
> You might have known them, in another time,  
>  By other names and in different forms,  
>  When you had less years and less scars,  
>  Back when the matriarch was home  
>  And hadn’t been devoured by inhuman teeth,  
>  Reduced overnight to fleshless bones  
>  And yet another name you shouldn’t speak.
> 
> One might have held the blue beast’s hands when she was young,  
>  And those fingers weren’t as long or adorned by scales,  
>  Played tag around the garden and sang her bedtimes songs,  
>  When she was a sister that instead of claws had nails.
> 
> One might have knelt in front of the red creature that called you son,  
>  As he looked down and considered whether to eat his young,  
>  He wasn’t always that color but the blood stained his skin;  
>  Little by little, there were less people coming out of his office than coming in.  
>  He sets fire to some flesh, turns around and moves on.
> 
> Still, one must forgets these thoughts,  
>  The last creature thinks, standing at the wooden stairs.  
>  But, then again, what for? There’s no one in there.
> 
> For such is a childhood home after the creatures have all been hunted down:  
>  They locked the bloody one behind concrete  
>  And the blue one in a facility uptown.
> 
> This is all there’s left of your childhood,  
>  Frighteningly long as it might have been,  
>  A home you can’t bear to put up for sale,  
>  And that you’re not crazy enough to live in.

* * *

He tries so very hard not to think about it, not to let it show on his face as he walks towards The Jasmine Dragon like a convicted.

It was a break of trust, he knows, it went against his most explicit wishes but Sokka had wanted to try and find something to understand him by. Bato always said 'be careful what you wish for', and Sokka should have been; he didn't want to understand him like this.

Sokka expects the next day to be coloured shades of grey and weighted by the heavy knowledge and the cloudy uncertainty, expects Lee to look him in the eye and know he betrayed his trust, used things he let out after letting down his walls and daring to be vulnerable, expects to be stricken down like Bluebeard's wife.

The day does not live to his expectations, bright cerulean and cloudless, warm with the sun but fresh enough with the ocean breeze.

Zuko doesn't either, waving happily at the sight of him, walks up to him to pull him aboard, declares they'll be sailing for the day with the same sort of joy of the night before. He isn't drunk and he's not planning on drinking, he's just pulling the right ropes and weights, steering The Jasmine away from shore while going on and on about his day, tides, weather and the deep meaning in scenes of movies he didn't care to watch.

He climbs the Jacob's ladder by the side as they sail away to avoid the situation all together — amicable conversation and open, earnest face as he does nothing to deserve it — watches as the town drifts further and further away under Zuko's careful ministrations.

“Land nowhere in sight, Captain!” He cries out, when the small strip of town and the many boats anchored by it disappear under the horizon's arbitrary line.

“Then we are exactly where I intended.” He replies and they are back to effortless banter.

“Plan on killing me already? I know I have a smart mouth, but you quite enjoy kissing it stupid.”

“The only thing making it stupid are those Koh awful jokes of yours.”

“Hey!” and “You laugh at them, what does that say of you?”

“That I'm spending too much time with you.”

If he stopped for a moment longer to look at him — burning golden under the sun, eyes bright and smile effortless — his fingers might have forgotten that they were supposed to grip the rope. He doesn't, but Lee still goes; ducks into his house and gives Sokka a moment to remember how to breathe before emerging with fishing rods.

“What the fuck, dude?” Sokka asks, but he's laughing.

“Rented them from the couple four boats down.” He says as if that explains anything about anything, but he's sure that it does to him. “They offered a great discount, thanks to your most generous offer of carrying their fishing container last night and—” He stepped aside to reveal the blue box he had helped out of the old couple's small boat yesterday. “Oh? What is this? Is that the same container? Who would have thought!”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, but why?”

Zuko's face softens all together, all the way to his eyes, gold as freshly polished coins and amber and fire.

“You said you missed fishing with your dad. I know I'm not your dad, but it's still… Fishing, I guess?”

 _Oh_. So he _had_ been listening. Sokka had always assumed he hadn't.

They fish. It'snot very productive, but they do try.

He attempts to teach Lee (Zuko?) how to fish: casting, hooking, a proper fishing etiquette and all about anglers. For all his best efforts and the other man's stubborn insistence to learn, Sokka hooks five to seven fishes out of the sea and Zuko (Lee?) fishes none — though to be honest, he might be doing it on purpose for all the sad glances and his refusal to remove the still flaying beings off the hook even if it means a generous dinner. He tells him the joke about the double fishhooks, he laughs and declares Sokka a superior fisherman, announces he's giving up on the competition due to unfair opposition then leans back to bask on sunlight and glimpses of Sokka that make his lips twitch upwards, jarringly fond. 

‘ _Is this real?_ ’, dwells in the tip of his tongue, ‘ _Is this you or are you pretending?_ ’

The sickening doubt chases after his heels, always too close to bite; in the way he holds his hand tight, to keep him from blending into his shadows, the creeping paranoia that had him second guessing the smallest moment, the most tender smile.

“A man after my own heart.” He tries, to see what he'll do.

When the soft snort of a laugh and the tilt of his head to hide his face come, he doesn't try to kiss his neck or coax his face into emerging, sees what he will do then.

Nothing.

He hides his face and pouts and tries to change the subject with a slight sulk, cheeks still red. Lee bleeds the sort of authenticity he had no right to, he looks and sounds so genuine and Zuko shouldn't be capable of that.

So Sokka pushes a little further, throws the hook to the sea and tests his words a little more: he asks questions. Zuko clams up with a sense of undesired melancholy, his smile wanes under the sadness but doesn't disappear completely. He leads the conversation away from talks of his name, sprouts some nonsense and asks him if he's fished enough to go home just yet. The wind runs it's gentle, ghost-like fingers through his hair in a woeful sort of fashion and carries the words from his mouth to his ears.

“Yeah, I think we have enough.”

For all his tenderhearted antics, hours later in the kitchen, Lee has no qualms about gutting fishes clean and cooking them with various spices.

He keeps figuring out things through scraps of poems and the chockhold of guilt, but Zuko never tells him a thing, never tells him his name.

He tells him about Katara and college and Aang and Toph and Appa and Momo, but he doesn't tell him anything but some stories about tea and his uncle, vague allusions to home and a family he had long set behind.

He has so many questions.

He asks none of them.

* * *

The drinking stops being fun and starts becoming concerning. Sokka doesn't want to enable him, doesn't want to be around someone who's never sober.

They set aside one day for a normal date, per Sokka’s request. Daytime, no alcohol allowed.

“Let’s eat out, for a change.” Sokka proposes.

“You’re just running from my spicy food and you know it.” He quipped back, and that had been that.

Lee — Zuko? — looks very apprehensive about it when he stops by the docks to pick him up, his poor attempts of jokes from the day before aside, but goes along with it either way and it's fun.

He's genuinely nice to be around, quick-witted and with a sarcastic humor that can be hindered by his occasional crippling awkwardness when he forgets how to people, remedied easily when he remembers how to Lee (how to Zuko?) around Sokka, with no heavy expectations or strict rules or anything but the easy familiarity and instinctual touches of the past week and a half. Tui and La, _the smiles_ he gives him between a snarky comment and the soft squeeze to his hand, he could bottle those smiles to cheer himself up in cloudy days.

Just as surely, there are the things that he finally catches on to flag down: how he keeps him always to his right, how his left eye seems to squint even more when Sokka ventures leisurely to that side as if trying to make out finer details. Loud sounds make him jump, abrupt movements make him flinch, raised voices have his back straightening and his shoulders stiffening and an unprompted touch sends him freezing like he expects for the worst.

They go to the park where they had kissed that first time, both drunk out of their minds and the spluttering of 'Lee' between them to keep ‘Zuko’ from sucking the joy out of the moment.

The lush green contrasts with the dark colors of his clothes but he seems to perk up under the sunlight, with a fire that their nights with artificial neon lights and the brief mornings don't really do justice. There are turtleducks by the pond and Zuko bullies him into buying bread at a local bakery so he can feed them and go about their love of them (plus half a dozen curiosities about them he doesn't even know how he gathered) and when they're all excessively fed and properly petted, Lee is the one to pick where lunch should be: somewhere cheap with decent food and an owner he apparently has become buddies in the days spent before Sokka's arrival as he discovered the ins and outs of the town.

Sokka stuffs his face with burger and Zuko — Lee? — eats with knife and fork, as if he's a member of the Royal Family of Kuei and bristles dramatically like a peafox whenever Sokka calls him by proper royalty-titles. They buy ice cream and he suffers amusedly through a rant of why peach-oranges are the superior fruit after one small comment about how lemon-pistachio is the best flavor and decides that, yes, he has very passionate opinions on everything and that's just something he should learn to live and find obscene amounts of entertainment with.

Chatter and laugher distracted them from the shifting sun, blue skies inched closer to starry dark and clocks were closer to dusk than dawn and Lee smiled with a suggestion hinted in his teeth.

“What is it?” Sokka asks instead of kissing the question out of his lips like he wants to.

“I could take you to watch a sunset to remember.” He replies, and Sokka feels more than knows that this is trust and a test at the same time. “It's not entirely legal, but it's worth it.”

It turns out to be not even remotely legal, but Sokka is friends with Toph.

They break into town hall, but Zuko is basically a bloody ninja and the people working here are old and covered in layers of dust from the monotone flow of their uneventful routine, so they're not caught. They sidestep boxes of old documents, suppress the childish giggles born of doing things they shouldn't and reach the top of the town's old watch tower.

Lee steals a kiss when he climbs the last step and Sokka allows it be stolen, steals another when he parts for breath, smiles into it and their teeth clash.

The horizon is a violent shade of orange when the sun sets, so orange it is mere shades away from red, like it's been punched there and the fiery bruise fades to pastel around the edges where barely-yellow meets almost-night-sky-blue. The bright eye of the sun ( _Agni_ , he calls it in a murmur and he hums) sneaks glances at them — Lee's head on his shoulder and Sokka's head over Zuko's head, both of their legs hanging over the gap between concrete and the giant clock that they sit in — until he gives up his place for the moon ( _Tui_ , he says in turn and he gives him an echo of his hum).

He sleeps with him sober: nose pressed against his nape, smile to his lips, arms wrapped around his waist, the tentative feeling of certainty curled behind the beating muscle of his heart, steady breathing into rest.

He wakes with Zuko blood-curling scream:

“Azula, please _no—!_ ”

He puts his hands on his shoulders, soothes him back into the present of Sokka's bed on this shitty flat with nonsense reassurances his brain puts together with adrenaline forcing back thought in his still mostly asleep mind, rocks along with his body as he heaves like a drowning man, confused and terrified and clawing at the raged scar on his chest, feels the shivers of sharply inhaled sobs under his fingertips placed over ribs. Sokka thinks of the specks of his sister along his various works, the melancholy about losing her he doesn't bother to extend to Ozai.

Then again, he's whispering ‘ _Azula always lies, Azula always lies_ ’ and doesn't realize he's doing it, short nails digging into his arm, alternates between heaving and calming breaths. If he read the articles, he would probably know what happened to her; find out if she died or if they're estranged and why talking about her seems to wound him like pulling teeth or holding too tightly at a rope that digs into skin.

Sokka almost tricked himself into thinking he had fathomed this man out; this man with too many scars in his body and secrets in his mouth.

He doesn't begrudge the bottles as much now. He even understands, in a way.

Still, he would just rather he talked.

* * *

> **Deep Blue**  
>  By Zuko Igarashi
> 
> She exists inside these walls now:  
>  Hidden from sight,  
>  Pills under her tongue.  
>  The door locks from the outside,  
>  We’re too far from home.
> 
> Two knocks to the padded wall,  
>  ‘Hey, can I come in?’,  
>  An all time high of courtisol,  
>  Falter in front of unseeing eyes,  
>  ‘Do you still know who I am?’,  
>  And she gives no grunts, no signs.
> 
> She exists inside these walls now,  
>  There’s the crave to reach to her,  
>  But do you even know how?

* * *

He disappears like smoke on air after that, a mention of a couple bad days incoming and the half-muttered promise of coming back soon over the plate of breakfast he pushed towards him his only warning.

Sokka gives him a day before he chases him, and after half of it he considers buying dogs to send after his scent when Lee seems to have slipped over the edge of existence with no plans of returning or being found.

It would be more concerning if the Jasmine wasn’t anchored in it’s usual spot, but considerably less concerning if the gossiping old woman who stank of fish and took advantage of him having being raised respectful and helpful to move her stuff hadn’t mentioned to him that she had not seen him in over three days after Sokka had answered ‘what do you mean’ to her initial question of ‘how is that friend of yours, anyway?’.

Now, Sokka couldn’t find him no matter how hard he tried and he had the crazed idea that he might be having a breakdown somewhere, completely isolated because he couldn’t be bothered to trust a human being for more than sex and breakfast and through the haze of being drunk where the edge of knowing that hands that are supposed to be gentle hurt the most when striking _to talk._

What kind of bad days was he facing alone? It was not the day of Ozai’s arrest, he knew that for sure, after so many news and articles and media coverage. What could be worse than that? What couldn’t be, if he stopped to read his earlier poetry, if he looked at his face, if he remembered the amount of raised skin his fingers had traced where scars had formed? Just what sort of things did he keep bottled to himself, in that ship and in the corners he disappeared off to?

He knew what it was like, to have a day so bad you wouldn’t mention it even when asked. Dad and Bato had sent him to therapy after Mom’s murder, and though he had talked the old man’s ear off, he had not said one word about Kya.

Needless to say, when worry brews over and over itself with no way of being resolved, Sokka gets pissed and when he gets pissed, he sees to getting drunk.

It's not like he has any other way of handling it in this town, and he’s not about to call Katara or Toph to rant about a man that won’t even tell him his name.

The choice of the bar is very purposeful too: it’s one they have never gone to together, one Zuko never had the chance to stain with memories of Lee, and you know what, oh mighty bar-knower? This one is cool, it looks nice and it has good music and if he hadn’t had his mood ruined by someone who would rather pull a disappearing act than at least stay in his boat and be there once in a while so Sokka knew he wasn’t dead or never coming back, he could have danced the night away, could have had fun!

Instead, he makes a beeline to the barman like an antisocial moody creep and asks for a Blue Lagoon to drown the curses of Ladammit he is acting just like Zuko down with some fancy alcohol.

The drink arrives and it’s rim is filled with a crust of sugar like crystals sticking out of rock, and the Blue Lagoon in itself looks positively electric blue in a way that is just too fancy and too bougie and about to weight a fuckton on his wallet, but he drinks it in one go. The alcohol is strong and it burns in many ways, none of them gentle — which is more than good, because he doesn’t need sugary drinks that get him drunk like he falls asleep, gradually and knowingly and thinking he’s in control until it twists his guts — he doesn’t need gentle tonight. It burns in many ways, his favorite being the one that burns and feels like anger and held back words.

Five or seven of these and just maybe this night won’t go to shit.

He orders a second one, just in case, but it’s over before he can really process that he has drank it. Sokka groans, miserable and annoyed and rests his forehead against the wooden surface in front of him.

If he had just _gone with dad_ in their traditional fishing trip, he would be much happier.

“Here.” A woman’s hand voice calls before a drink is placed I front of him by a slender, pale hand. “And I didn’t even tell you to smile for it. Some men have the lovely habit of doing that.”

“Not in the smiling mood.” He says, but pulls the drink closer to herself and doesn’t look up at her as a hint that he doesn’t feel like talking either (a page he took from _Lee_ ’s book), but his loud mouth did not get the memo, it seems. “Y’know, usually it’s the guy that pays the girl a drink.”

“First of all, that’s sexist.” She says, perfectly unbothered, and plops on the seat by his side, leaning towards him with a hand outstretched to wave along her points. “Second, you clearly need it more than me. I mean, there’s gotta be a story there if you feel half as exhausted as you look.”

Sokka cannot help the laugh that escapes him, shaking in his chest and ricocheting it’s way up his throat - that’s how he looks up at her, laughing because she doesn’t have a clue, smiling because he knows this is not a story you quite walk away from. She is shorter than him but he can tell already she’s tougher. Her eyes are blue, her hair is auburn-brown and short and it’s even livelier against the greens and dark grays she’s wearing. Her complexion is fair but not as fair as Zuko’s and she’s smiling back at him, eyes sharpened by her wingliner, still waiting for his story.

“Well?” She asks, almost like a dare, ‘ _out with it_ ’ implied in her tone.

He indulges.

“Buy me another drink and I just might tell you.”

* * *

The girl’s name is Suki. She gives it up easily when asked, volunteers information on her college and life, what she likes and doesn’t likes, her friends and her diminshed family, her age and her Instagram and doesn’t have secrets to hide or five books or a mystery mother or an arrested father and a sister that caused at least half of her scars.

Sokka almost forgot that’s how normal people talk.

At some point, music starts ricocheting in the walls of the bar, and young people peel from the walls and floors and shadows in more numbers than he ever seen them in this town or in the bars he frequented with Zuko. Maybe they were going to less crowded bars, less known bars, and Sokka didn’t know. It was just like Zuko to shy away from people like he shied away from speaking. 

Suki gasps something about loving this song and tugs him towards the dance floor. Sokka goes, willingly, dances moves he learned from Aang and that four blue lagoons have rendered awkward and uncoordinated. Closes his eyes, forgets there’s still more four terms before he’s graduated and that there’s a man missing from his boat just six block down and twirls around, holding onto Suki’s waist as she holds onto his hands.

“You know what we should do?” She asks, all bright smiles and the relief of two-weeks-long break from tough work in her muscles as she unwinds at the dance floor.

“What?” He asks, feeling just happy in a more effortless manner than he has felt in days, willing to follow her anywhere she wants to go, if she’s what does the trick.

“Go bar hopping.” She grins, like a half-moon.

Sokka grins back, squeezes her hand.

“Let’s go.”

The problem with bar hopping with Suki is this: this is only her second day on the city and she only knows two bars, the one they are currently in and the one across from street. It makes for a funny situation the first six times they walk in and out of this, only to order a drink and dance and giggle on their way out only to do it again ten minutes later.

“Do you know any other bars?” She asks in the seventh time they walk out of Fancy Bar 1 and cross the street to Fancy Bar 2. “You’ve been here for a week and a half, haven’t you? You have to know some!”

He does. He knows a lot of them.

“We’re better off just trying to walk in that one with the neon sign.” Sokka says, pointing to the the opposite directions of all the many bars that had led him to the Jasmine, like yellow bricks.

He’s not sure either he’s trying to protect this careless moment from memories of Zuko or if he’s trying to keep those memories safe from being altered by Suki, but he’s much better off walking side by side with her, arm wrapped around her shoulders and hers around his back, towards the new bar and new drinks and songs so there’s no way of pondering or wondering or asking or any other hellish capability of a rational mind.

Fancy Bar 3 is not as fancy but not so bad. Their Blue Lagoon isn’t as strong, but he drinks another three of those and gets there all the same. The music is electronic instead of pop as the others, and the beating dictates the pulse of his heart and the rhythm of Suki’s jumps, her head swaying from side to side, auburn hair flowing from side to side and gold hoop earrings moving along.

This feels fun and effortless and easy. Natural, like blossoming into a smile after a happy moment, or hugging Katara when she concedes to a bad idea, joking about his bad back as he helps Dad carry boxes into his and Bato's new house, dodging Toph’s punch with a laugh, kissing Zuko when he looked up at him and the sun caught in his eyes. He shakes his head against the last memory and thinks instead of what it would be like to kiss Suki, of what would have been if these two weeks were spent with her instead of searching clues to understand a person who clearly didn’t want to be understood.

Maybe it would have been nice. THis is nice.

“I’m drunk as fuck.” He says, sighing as she takes off her heels, leaning against the wall by the door.

“I don’t remember my last name.” Sokka says, and she shakes her head at him, smiling with all her teeth.

“Unfortunate. We crash on whoever’s place is closest?”

Her flat is closer, so they go. He moves to try to kiss her (because that should be the natural progression of a night like that, shouldn’t it? It had been that way with all others before) but trips on her carpet and they laugh, like children, her fingers trying to hold him up but her legs giving out under her as the laughter steals her oxygen. It feels better than kissing, somehow. It feels like being young.

In the end, Sokka sleeps on her living room’s couch, limbs thrown about in drunken disarray, and doesn’t dream. Suki is ever so gracious in throwing a blanket over his passed out form before going to her bed and letting sleep win over her once she’s switched into pajamas.

He wakes up to the sound of dishes and mugs and sunlight creeping through the window, curls himself in the too-thin blankets and not-his-bed but also not-rocking-with-the-waves bed, furrows his brows and calls:

“Lee?”

“Not quite.” A woman’s voice answers.

Of course. The night before enters stage left in the theater of his memory. Suki.

He gets up.

Suki gives him a healthy breakfast of fruits and cereal with a mug of coffee filled to the brim.

There’s no tea in the table.

He asks more questions, lets their voices add to the spiral of small talk and doesn’t think about that.

* * *

> **From Kyoshi**  
>  By Zuko Igarashi
> 
> Maybe she was birthed by a woman  
>  Or maybe she was born form the earth;  
>  The flesh to her bones is plenty human  
>  But what to name the irreverent fortitude  
>  Like mountain rivers, freshly renewed,  
>  That resides in her and knows no dearth?
> 
> Maybe this girl was born a woman  
>  But she also is part of the earth,  
>  An extension of the small island  
>  That has taught her all she has known,  
>  Under skies that met their highland  
>  And surrounded by seas unspeakably deep.
> 
> Her first step might have sowed  
>  yellow wildflowers amidst grass,  
>  The span of her shoulders were  
>  built of hills and their crevasses,  
>  Her fingers coaxed trees into flourish  
>  And with their autumn branches wove  
>  Herself fans that span as yellow  
>  As the golden flowers from before.
> 
> Her laugh might have been an echo  
>  Of the hymn of native songbirds,  
>  Smile framed by lips forever reddened  
>  By bite fulls of ripe fruit  
>  The land as a whole might have wept,  
>  With rain and leaves heavy with dew,  
>  When she crossed their seas and left  
>  And found her way to this city and you.
> 
> Maybe she was birthed by a woman  
>  And her body is flesh and bone  
>  Maybe she was as her homeland,  
>  Lush green woods and towering stone.  
>  Maybe she has a name to be known by,  
>  Human given and written with ink.  
>  Yet, if one were to grasp her nature,  
>  The seas and woods and hills in her  
>  What should us mortal men call  
>  A girl who has come from Kyoshi?

* * *

He finds him the day after, almost passed out over the bar on the first place they've ever met.

The Boulder looks at him from time to time with a clear distaste and a small scar in his head where Zuko broke a glass bottle against it, but keeps his respectful distance.

“So you're alive.” Sokka greets him in a clipped tone.

Subtleties like that are easy to miss when you're shit faced, he presumes, because when Lee turns to him, eyes wide with recognition, he doesn't seem to take notice of neither the clipped tone nor his angry expression. He bursts into a smile and makes grabby hands at him instead.

“ _Sokkaaaaa_.” He says, holds onto his hands when he tries to lower Lee's, doesn't stop smiling. “You’re too early. I was only going to see you tomorrow!"

“Were you?” He asks, doubtful and bitter still but lets himself be tugged closer like a toy. Maybe that’s exactly what he is to him. “I couldn’t find you yesterday.”

His smile dies, even though he is or should be drunk enough for no sad thoughts to bother him. Then again, Sokka thinks as Lee’s scarred face flickers through a sort of grief he can’t truly name and tries to shove it back down repeatedly, if there’s enough alcohol in the world to do that without killing him.

Maybe killing himself is the point.

“It was the anniversary of a loss.” He finally manges, spitting the words like they’re stones, turning to the bar to lift his glass dramatically to the skies, spilling half of it on himself. “To my mother, wherever she may be.”

He means to drink it, of that much Sokka is sure, but he can’t manage when he begins to do a wheezing laughter thing that sounds just too close to crying for comfort.

The anger and the bitterness fades in his chest and Sokka finds himself knelt by his side, looking at the saddest and most interesting man he has ever met and laying a gentle hand in his shoulder as he sob-laughs.

“I think you’re done for the night, bud.” He whispers.

Lee nods again and again, leaning to the side until his head rests against his shoulder. He lets him be there, laughing and sobbing and choking and breathing raggedly again until he’s in a fit condition to be guided away from the bar, bill already pre-paid. 

“You know, they never found a body.” He says when they arrive at the docks, voice low as a whisper or a confession or hope, breath stinking of the strongest vodka he could find in the bar, eyes clouded by a memory Sokka is not privy to. “She might not be dead.”

Sokka looks at him, brows furrowed, concern rolling off of in waves and proceeds to help him up the Jasmine, careful to not be in the hit line of any potential vomit.

Maneuvering a drunk poet with more secrets than he has poems and the stubbornness of a manateemule is as hard as it fucking sounds: Zuko, honest to Tui and La, places both of his feet in either side of the wooden handrail of the stairs and pushes himself up, complaining about how it's not bedtime and the stars are beautiful and ' _I'm going to scream and if you try to cover my mouth I'll just lick it'_.

Eventually, though, with much convincing and more patience than he ever granted Katara as a child, he gets him to walk down the stairs. No matter how careful Sokka tries to be, he hits the same walls three times and nearly falls to the ground when trying to get into bed. He's been mumbling about a fellow named Bukowski the whole way and Sokka keeps waiting for him to explode in deeply passionate recitals of his poems, but it doesn't come.

It doesn't come for the reason that when Lee is laid in bed and Sokka hovers above him to get him out of his jacket and take off his shoes, he starts waxing his own poetics over how pretty Sokka is and how good of a kisser and how even though he's ' _a disgusting coffee addict'_ Zuko would like to known him for a lifetime. 

There's a delighted gasp and he goes on and on about things he never went over before — things that are too close to home and to his real story and things Sokka shouldn't know, but does — such as introducing him to his Uncle and showing him around Caldera and that one coffee shop he never walked in because coffee was horrible but that had looked cozy and how his mom would have probably liked him but his father would have tried to murder Sokka (two pats to the hand, _it's alright,_ pat pat _, he's behind bars now_ ) and Azula would proprably try to stab him to test his character and Mai would just give him the neutral face of displeasure but Ty Lee would love him.

It's too much. It almost sounds like he wants there to be something when this all ends, and thinking about hows and whys hurts too much, so Sokka changes the subject.

“I met a nice girl yesterday, it’s her first week in town. I must have talked about you all night.” Lee smiles, that stupid smile that makes him weak. If he was an artist, he could paint it; as it is, he needs to rely on his mortal memory and all it's flaws. “She wants to meet you.”

“When?” He asks, nuzzles his hand when he must have probably been trying to nuzzle the pillow.

“Sunday night.” Sokka replies, stifled the soft chuckle that wants to make itself heard because Lee-Zuko is making himself unfairly adorable. “At 9PM. You can pick where, she doesn't know many bars.”

"Fine by me.” Zuko says, warm breath against the back of his hand, gold eyes fluttering closed, he pulls the blankets up to his chin and frees Sokka's hand in the process, frowns slightly when Sokka pulls it away. “Now let me sleep or die, whichever comes first.”

If Sokka didn't know him better, he'd take that for a joke.

* * *

Saturday dawned over an unnatural morning.

Unnatural not because Sokka was sitting on the couches to the left but becuase Zuko ( _not Lee, he was never Lee, why couldn't he just tell him that he wasn't Lee?_ ) was still knocked out over the covers and staying that way for hours past sunrise, instead of rising with it like the unholy morning person he was, even after drinking and smoking and fucking all in one night.

Sure, that hadn’t been the case last night, but it had been the case so many nights before that he was seriously considering if the man hadn’t just finally drank himself into an alcoholic coma.

His fears prove to be for naught at 9:45AM, when said cause of his concerns wakes with a miserable groan and makes the morning even more unnatural by flinching away from the sun as he should never do, because he glowed under it and drew life-source from it's warmth or something like that.

“Did I die?” He asks from under the piles of blankets.

Sokka smiles, it's not fully genuine but not totally sad either.

“Afraid not, bud.” He says, louder than he really needs to be speaking and delights at seeing him cringe under the blankets, complain a whined out version of his name softly. Sokka chuckles and takes the porcelain cup from where he knows he keeps it (top cabinet, second shelf, the beige one that’s chipped in one side that Sokka lovingly nicknamed Chip), adds the leaves and, as taught, begins to pour the hot water steadily. “I would say better luck next time, but I like your company too much.”

“The misery continues.” He hears Lee announce through a grumble, then lift the blankets to peek out at the kitchen counter like a kid. “Is that tea?”

Sokka grins and raises a brow, deliberately, before letting out the magic word:

“Peppermint.”

And there he goes, under Sokka’s snickering, kicking the covers aside and swearing like a sailor when confronted with the headache and nausea of his hangover, but marching on valiantly to reach for the newly made teacup of his favorite hangover-blend like a drowning man, or maybe just a very hungover one.

“Rough night?” He teases.

“Hmuck mmoff.” Is his answer.

Sokka smiles to himself, turns to the oven and focuses on trying not to burn the toast beyond the point of it being edible.

It’s another needless effort, apparently, because Lee wolfs anything and everything put in a plate in front of him down, no matter how close to charcoal-black it might be and how indistinguishable it might be. It’s truly surprising he’s as good of a chef as he is, if this is the kind of apetite he has - that or not eating anything at all, because he’s made of extremes and extremes only.

Another concern: he talks so very little that it’s impossible not to ask himself either or not he remembers enough of last night to regret, or that i twould be infinetely easier if he didn't, so that the knowledge could be stored away from his mind and heart and along with the pile of things he would have never wanted Sokka to know but that Sokka searched for either way.

When his Tantalus-like hunger fades into only tea drinking, he leans back and puts on his thinking face. He probably remembers.H He opens his lips and Sokka braces himself for whatever might fall in the heels of the worst night of Lee’s he has ever witnessed. 

“Would you go to the pond in the park with me?”

He had not expected that.

Yet, he asks it so embarrassed, quiet as if already convinced he will hear a ‘no’ even if it’s to such a simple of a request as ‘come feed the ducks with me?’, that Sokka just… Cannot deny him.

“Of course, babe.”

By the looks of Zuko - cheeks dusted with pink, eyes adverted to the ground, lips almost smiling - he hadn't expected _that_ either.

It will not kill them, he decides, to try and have one good day ignoring the fact that this ship is sinking under their feet. They buy bread at the same bakery, they talk about the same nonsense things, he holds his hand as if nothing were happening, and they walk to sit by the pond. Zuko offers him a handful of bread and he takes it, throws it in the water and waits for the animals to come.

“I'm sorry you had to listen to that.” He whispers, eventually, offering him yet another piece of bread. “I hadn't meant you to.”

“It's okay, you needed the support.” He ignores the bread and squeezes his hand instead. “You want to talk about it?”

“No.” He says, firm and decided, as if he was asked this before. With a story like his, he must have. “If I begin I won’t stop. Even if I wanted, I wouldn't even know how to."

Which is fair, Sokka supposes. Not even the reporters writing about it know where to start, where would someone that lived through it even begin with?

They sit in silence until Zuko runs out of bread, throws the crumbs to the water in a pointless attempt to keep the mother turtleduck and her children close for just one more moment, watches her fuss over each and every one before guiding them away.

The park suddenly feels sadder than it should, with two orphans and the memory of their mothers over their heads.

There's a short exchange of words.

“So tomorrow…?”

“Yeah.” Quiet as a breath, and “At 9. Tell me where and I'll be there."

Zuko's head leans on his shoulder, Sokka holds his hand a little bit tighter. He doesn't cry, but this is a silent sort of grief Sokka can understand all too well.

He wonders what Zuko’s mother name was, thinks about googling it but draws the line in the sand there. There are other questions, so he turns his attention to them: if Kya and her would have gotten along, if Ozai hugged Zuko and his sister when she died, if Azula and him relied on each other for support through the years without her there to watch over them.

He wonders if he would have ever met him if his life had been happy in any way.

He wonders how many shifts of his own life would it have taken for him to end up like Lee.

* * *

> **Under The Table**  
>  By Zuko Igarashi
> 
> Her name is pretty and her hair is brown,  
>  Her homeland is far and she is new in town.  
>  She smiles brightly and you smile in return,  
>  I’m not a sore loser, so let’s make this work.
> 
> She reminds me of home  
>  Or of people from there,  
>  A girl with practice knives  
>  And another who’s an acrobat,  
>  Both must be better off now.  
>  ‘What bars do you know?’  
>  ‘None, I’m new in town’.
> 
> For the past week you have frowned  
>  Every time I glanced at a bottle,  
>  But to her you proudly declare  
>  That there is no need to fret.  
>  ‘We have a connoisseur among us.  
>  He must have been to all the bars  
>  There are in this town by now.’
> 
> I do not understand you, how you think  
>  And what displeases you. What don’t you see?  
>  All you have to do is give me the right cues  
>  And I will do whatever you want me to.  
>  Maybe you don’t understand me either,  
>  That might be it, but also might not.  
>  At least I tended to the sails while  
>  Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
> 
> ‘I’ll drink you under the table’,  
>  She dares and I’m four days dry,  
>  But your brow doesn’t crease  
>  When she’s the one to say it,  
>  So I laugh, run through my lines.  
>  ‘You can certainly try’.  
>  Better to get back to old habits,  
>  After all, under the deck of the boat  
>  Alcohol will be all there’s left.  
>  That, and the packs of cigarettes.

* * *

Sokka comes to Zuko first, for reasons of he’s virtually impossible of being reached if he doesn’t want to, as the last three days have so clearly shown him ( _no, he’s not angry or resentful, it just was a major dick move and no dead mothers will get him to believe otherwise_ ). He doesn’t walk to The Jasmine, nor does he look up to wait for him to approach, instead keeping his head down and his eyes trailed on the exchange of texts between him and Suki.

_‘I’m picking him up’_

_‘Say hi to him for me :)’_ and _‘be nice, I know you’re upset still’_

 _‘I’m not’_ , he lies.

“Hey.” The familiar voice calls, and Sokka looks up to find him in well-kept clothes, a shirt of deep maroon and black pants and an overcoat. He combed his hair and he smells of fire lilies and burned wood, which means he used perfume for this; His face is expectant but not hopeful, and once Sokka looks up at him, he looks down and away and bites his lip as if he’s ashamed, or embarrassed. Not the good embarrassed. “I’m, uh… I’m ready to go, when you are.”

Sokka looks at him and realizes he’s not upset and he’s not resentful. He’s just hurt and disappointed, now that he doesn’t have to manage a heartbroken man dealing with grief in the worst way.

 _’I thought you trusted me. I thought you knew you could trust me with these things’_ , he thinks, but he didn’t and he didn’t and Suki just sent him a text saying she left home and he’s hurt, but he wants to figure out where they stand too.

He pockets his phone, musters a smile from the depths of his stomach and says:

“Cool. Let’s go, then.”

They walk in silence, Sokka in front of him instead of walking side by side, trying to shrug off the awkward heavy tension between them and not looking behind him to check if Zuko’s following. He must be.  
He texts Suki the address and walks in first too, instead of opening the door for him.

They drink in silence and don’t look at each other. Zuko looks like he would rather be anywhere else, drowning under his overcoat and holding a glass of water in-between his hands, alternating looks between it and Sokka, as if trying to figure out rules he hadn’t been told beforehand.

It’s a relief, to him at the very last, when Suki walks into the bar like a breeze of fresh air and self-assured smiles.

“No bar hopping today?” Suki asks, with a mock pout, unzipping her jacket to throw over the table.

“Not tonight.” He says through a chuckle and moves to hug her, doesn’t quite understand why she looks at him in disapproval when he sits back at his spot. Did she expect him to pull out her chair or what?

Silence hangs above them as her brows arch more and more towards her hairline, clearly expecting something from him that he cannot figure out what for—

“Hey.” The something says and Sokka closes his eyes and cringes at his own dick-headedness. “I’m Lee.”

“Hi, Lee!” Suki says, wide smile but eyes staring dead at Sokka with the intent of making him feel even worse before she moves to sit at Zuko’s side, across from the table. “So, you’re Sokka’s mystery man!”

“Mystery Man?” Zuko asks, about the same time Sokka whines “ _Sukiii!_ ”.

She ignores them both smoothly.

“What do you do for a living?” She asks, like she’s a mom and not a twenty one year old asking a twenty two year old about life. Zuko visibly reddens, but doesn’t shift away from her, merely gives her his most amicable smile and acts on his best behavior.

“Not much of anything.” He says, sheepishly. “I used to write, but now I’m sort of a vagabond.”

Did… Did he just admitted to writing? Sure, he didn’t say he was a poet, but he did say he wrote before this. Sokka feels himself start fuming. He never told him about writing anything, but he’s telling Suki, a complete stranger?

“A vagabond?” She repeats, smile wide and eyes twinkling with amusement as she directs her gaze to Sokka. “I dare say we have a scholar among us!”

Zuko snorts out a laugh.

“I only have a bachelor’s degree.”

“A bachelor’s degree.” She repeats, in the same, but does join the stilted laugh Zuko gives once again with a more open one, nudging his shoulder with hers. “Is it true you have a boat?"

“It’s my uncle’s.” _It is?_ “But I’m living on it.”

“How is it? Living on a boat?”

“Well, it’s—”

He stands up abruptly enough that his chair scrapes against ground, Suki’s smile falls and she looks at him as if he’s acting crazy and Zuko stopped mid sentence to fix him a cautious look, confused and hurt and almost… Almost scared that he might have displeased him.

“I’m going to get us more drinks.” Sokka announces, unwilling to hear whatever else of information he’s willing to share now that Sokka spent days digging for scraps.

Tentatively, the conversation resumes behind him, and he cools down slightly from this fit of whatever he’s having that makes him dumb and insensitive, because they’re all just trying to be nice and get along. Well, the others are, at least, because Sokka is being an ass. He sighs, as Suki undoes his actions on Zuko, unwinds him enough that he’s at least smiling again without having his shoulders squared to defend himself when Sokka comes back.

“Here they are.” He announces, ignores how Suki leans forward but Zuko leans back slightly when he lays the drinks on the table for his own sanity, and sits by Suki’s side this time instead of the chair he had bee occupying before, to Zuko’s right. “Careful with him, he has as much alcohol tolerance as he has recklessness.”

“You just say that because you’re a lightweight.” Zuko attempts a joke, waits for Suki and Sokka to reach for their own drinks before doing the same to his.

“I say that because you’re seriously scary.” Sokka says, arching his brows playfully, trying to put him at ease. It doesn’t much work, he just looks quietly confused at his change of attitude.

“Well, I love challenges.” Suki declares and when golden eyes flicker to her, his whole posture seems to grow at ease at least slightly. “I’ll drink you under the table!” She half-jokes, half-dares Zuko, lifting her green drink towards him.

Zuko smiles, that genuine smile of his, with all the teeth and the crinkles to the side of his eyes that Sokka had to put so much work to see for the first time, and raises his drink to clink against hers.

“We’ll see about that, Kyoshi girl.”

* * *

That’s what Suki gets, Sokka thinks, for not listening to him: wasted.

Well, wasted and apparently best buddies with Zuko, who is on the middle of a particularly strange monologue about the perils of being drunk at sea when you’re on a one-man-boat and out of the reach of society as Suki alternates between nodding off and trying really hard to pay attention.

“You puke, like, _a lot_ in the beginning.” Zuko says sagely, eyes looking far away for a moment as if remembering one such afternoon before shaking his head and lifting his glass. “But then you get used to it. After you master hangovers at sea, hangovers at land have nothing on you.”

“I’m glad to know your priorities and life skills are so closely aligned.” Sokka says over his own drink, a faint hint of a smile on his lips that does nothing to ease the nervous insecurity to Zuko’s gaze now.

“Yeah.” He says, his eyes shine with quiet amusement. “I know someone who did not mind some of my life skills. What was that, me being an awesome cook?”

Sokka gasps in faux outrage, moving from his spot as Suki armrest, which disturbs her to the point of grumbling and that he stones by wrapping an arm around her, some eh can nuzzle against him again.

“Don’t use the crepes against me, your monster!”

“Sure. Then I’ll use the burnt toast against you.”

“It was just the once!”

“The thrice, you mean?”

“The _once_.”

“ _Thrice_.”

“That’s why you called out for him in the morning that day in my house?” Suki asks, grinning though unfocused eyes and missing the way the man behind her shifts unsurely, blinking confusedly at the new piece of information then saddening just as her hand takes his, shakes it slightly. “You wanted crepes and I only gave you cereal and fruit. You missed the crepes.”

“I hate you.” Sokka says, but he’s smiling like an idiot down at her, his fingers interwine with hers. “I hate you both and you are terrible.”

“Yeah, right.” He answers softly, then looks away, drinking as if that would take the edge off.

He had seen him drink a whole bottle of vodka alone and the edge did not budge, not like it did over cups of tea and pointless chatters in the morning. He doesn’t comment to him about the drink, though. It would be unfair to since he and Suki are drinking too.

“So, you two are…?” Suki begins, before waving her hands wildly, giggling in her happy drunk stupor. “What are the two of you exactly?”

Sokka mouth goes dry, like sandpaper or just outright sand. He snaps his eyes and finds golden eyes already looking at him, with the same question to them and an unwillingness to put their input least it's something unwelcomed and shot down.

They never did talk about what they were, didn't they? Friends didn't fuck or kiss or name constellations after the other's smile like they did, one time flings didn't keep meeting and stalling the day they'd leave to spend one more afternoon with them, lovers did not hide something as simple as names from each other, so what exactly are they?

“We're drinking buddies.” Sokka declares, and feels like he's saying the wrong thing but keeps running with it. “The best in town.”

“Makes sense, with the way he can hold his alcohol.” Suki says, nodding wisely, though she does shoot Sokka a disappointed look before squeezing Lee's forearm, some of her weight falling onto him as it had been on Sokka, but he shoulders her effortlessly, a hand holding her up. “Be my drinking buddy too?”

Zuko smiles, nods and doesn't say a thing. If Sokka notices that his smile is pure acting, his eyes are dull and he drinks what’s left on his glass to drink more aggressively than he needs to, it's only because he's projecting.

“You’re nice.” Suki starts mumbling against his shoulder. “You’re real fancy but you’re really nice.”

“You’re nice too.” Zuko whispers, looking up at Sokka over her head. “I think we’re done for the night.”

“ _Noooooo_.” Suki whines but Sokka nods at him and gets up, helping her to stand with a gentle tug or two to her arm until she follows him to her feet, but not without having a secure grip on Zuko’s shirt to tug him along. He sighs, but goes with her with an exasperated smile to his face. “Can he come with?”

“No, I’m going back home.” He denies gently, before Sokka can, and begins trying to get he fingers to loosen their grip on him, but he’s swaying on his feet, his left eye keeps squinting more and more and there’s something off, in general.

“Can I go see your boat?” Suki asks, excited and delighted by the idea, and Sokka thinks about how he actually wouldn’t mind a night at the Jasmine himself, if only for the boat’s sake.

“Remember what I said about hangovers on sea?”

Suki pouts, but does let go of him this time.

“You owe me a ship visit later.”

Zuko nods, but doesn’t promise a thing, letting him and Suki go out first so he can hide better how wasted he truly was by stumbling over his feet behind them, where they can’t see.

Sokka knows how he’s wired now though - or at least thinks he does where alcohol and keeping his problems to himself are concerned. He stops when they’re out of the bar and into the cool night’s air, turns to look at him with concern.

“You really okay, bud?”

“I’m fine.” Comes the clipped reply. He does not meet his eyes.

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“You could tag along. My place is just-”

“Sokka.” He says, voice cold and hard and serious in a way he never heard it before, face turned into ice and not betraying a thing, eyes _still not looking at him_. “I’ve walked myself home before I met you, I can do it after too.” Sokka doesn’t answer, doesn’t argue, he merely blinks. Where had this version of him been hiding? Zuko sighs and the ice softens slightly. Another act. He had so many of those it got difficult to tell them apart form genuine reactions. “Just… Take her home, alright?”

He nods and does as he’s told.

Sokka looks back once, over his shoulder with armfulls of Suki to steer and about to turn left into the street of his flat, and sees his figure retreating towards the sea, a hand outstretched, pressed against the wall to steady his steps and shoulders shaking into spasms that might be a trick of the mind.

It’s the first time they part ways on the way to their houses after going out together. It won’t be the last.

* * *

> **Cut Your Losses**  
>  By Zuko Igarashi
> 
> Wise men know when to stop,  
>  As should you when this began,  
>  So do what you must: wisen up.
> 
> Here’s what you have learned of your brief affair with true romance:  
>  It fills your heart with the sort of happiness you’ll wish you hadn’t had the chance to know  
>  But heartbreak is what drives wise men to learn when to stop.
> 
> Now that affections dwindle and the roles shift from under where you stand,  
>  Calm your heart’s pace from giddy-happy to realistic-slow,  
>  For even good men can be fickle and you must wisen up.
> 
> Now that you must leave, bruised by the ghost of love, tend to your wounds best you can  
>  Gather you belongings, wait for the proper moment and be on the ready to go.  
>  For now you’ve been made wise and wise men know when to stop.
> 
> This brand new pain will not relent while in the company of this man   
>  As holding the cutting end of a blade won’t make the blood not flow  
>  So do what you must, leave him to her and wisen up.
> 
> His memory will forever on stain this patch of land  
>  From which common sense guides you away by the hands and betterment demands you to forgo  
>  And you’ll heed to them both because wise men know when to stop.  
>  So do what you must: leave this town behind and wisen up.

* * *

The moon was supposed to be full today, but the clouds hide her up in the sky and cast shadows down in the streets.

He's sober again this time; waiting for him on the boat and waving hello with a smile.

From what he can see, there's a cigarette on his lips and a bottle of bourbon with two cups set behind him. All in all, plenty evidence that he doesn't plan to stay sober, not really.

It's okay, Sokka wasn't planning on it either.

“Hey.” He greets, with a tilt of his head, and doesn't offer him a hand to help him up to the Jasmine.

Sokka sways in his spot for a moment but doesn't frown, merely climbs aboard like he has a hundred of times here and a thousand more back home and tries to figure what is going on with him, with them.

Something feels changed, irreparably so.

Did he do something wrong? Was it not alright after all to let him walk home alone after last night? Suki had been way more wasted than Zuko, but Zuko had looked like someone had gutted his favorite turtleduck for half of the night. Should he have come with him, would he have let him hold him through whatever that had been?

Right now, with a smile that looks made for show and eyes guarded-distant, Zuko looks like he’ll never let him hold him again.

“Hi.” He tries after a moment, a moment where he doesn’t come closer, smiles at him but Lee doesn’t smile back and this feels wrong.

“Hey.” Zuko repeats and arches a brow, his lips twitch into an almost genuine smile before that sad coldness sets over his face again, contorts his expression back into something he can not read or understand, turning his back to him and towards the bottles. “Do you take your advise with brandy or should I go fetch something else?”

“I take brandy without advise, actually.” He says, taking the glass that’s shoved in his hand. Lee doesn’t look like himself, or Zuko doesn’t look like himself. Either way this is not the man he knows, he is the ice man from yesterday. Sokka drinks half the glass before trying again. “But, out of curiosity, what advise?”

“A simple one, actually.” Lee says, cigarette dangling from his lips as he fidgeted with the lighter. “Don’t be stupid.”

Sokka blinks for a moment, not quite getting it. Zuko is victorious over the lighter, and drags in smoke like he means for it to take the place of oxygen in his lungs and fills Sokka's glass up to the brim again.

“Don’t be stupid?” Sokka asks, waiting for clarification, and drinks more.

“Don’t be stupid.” He says, letting out a puff of smoke from his mouth that climbed high into the sky as if Zuko was a dragon or a house fire.

“I can be very stupid, so you might need to be a little more specific.” Sokka quips, good-naturedly, reaches a hand in waiting for his turn with the cigarette, smiles up at the face that’s forever half-scowling but momentarily half-smiling at him, golden eyes indulgent and fond. “How should I go about not being stupid, Your Jerkiness?”

He takes one last, long drag and passes it to Sokka’s waiting hands, calloused fingers brushing against calloused fingers.

“Don’t settle for me.”

Sokka chokes on the smoke and at the light hearted humor from before, his attempts to cheer him up. They have no room here.

“What?”

“Don’t pretend this is going to last.” He says, and he sounds mad at him then. Why is he even mad at him? He’s not the one throwing this bombin the conversation. “Even if I stayed, you’re leaving in a few weeks. Your summer break ends soon, doesn’t it?”

Yes, it does. He knows that and Zuko knows that, because he stayed for most of it. And he would have to leave, yes, and Ba Sing Se doesn’t have ports if Zuko was to follow him but…

“What if I stayed?”

“In here?” He asks, with a belittling snort and a tone to his voice that Sokka doesn't recognize, can't possibly be Zuko's. “In a town with only ports, fishermen and bars? You wouldn't.” He is doing that thing again, the not looking at him that hurts more than he can explain, lifts his bottle in a wordless toast to the night and drinks like he wants either to drown or to choke. “You have a life, you have college, you have friends and her university is a few hours from yours. Plus she is nice and she likes you back. Don’t give up those things.”

It would be decidedly easier for Sokka if he didn't make such good points while looking so painfully sad.

“Where will you go?" He asks, finally, because if he chooses Suki ( _if it doesn't work and he regrets it and if it does work and he doesn't regret it_ ) will he ever be able to find him again through more than random gossip on the news, an analysis of the trauma embedded in his poems by a poetry page? 

Zuko looks back at him with the settled numbness of someone who was asked that question enough times to know how to answer; tilts his chin towards the sea behind Sokka's back.

“Up the coast there are plenty of towns I docked in. There are plenty of people who asked me the same question when I decided to leave. Song and Jet and Jin. You'll get the same answer as them: I don't know, I'll let the sea decide.”

The names rattle in his head. Song and Jet and Jin. Did they spend their days on deck, drinking and smoking and telling him secrets they had never voiced before? Is that what this is? Did they all kiss him, did they sleep with him, had there only been three or were those the most recent ones, whose names hadn’t faded from his mind? Had he been lee to them too or did he change his fake names once in a while, to spice things up?

 _Who are you after all?_ , he thinks, _Do I know you in any way?_ and _If you really leave, will you even remember me?_

Was this just a long conjob where he was hooked by a cute boy with a mysterious past and in the next town, when he leaves another person behind the names he will say will be Song and Jet and Jin and Sokka?

“Sounds like you’re hiding behind excuses.” He says, his voice too strained to even pretend to be anything but accusing.

Zuko's jaw works like he’s chewing at a particular bitter something, closing his eyes and turning his face away and into the darkness, so he cannot make out his expression.

”Sounds like you’re mad because you wanted another sort of answer.” He lets out, finally.

 _You bastard_ , he bites back.

Sokka doesn’t pass the cigarette back, he tats it against the ship’s side and lets it die. It’s one less light to look him by and Zuko makes no move to complain or to take it back or to be offended. He just keeps doing that infuriating thing where he looks at him without keeping eye contact with him, hidden in the sail’s shadows like a coward, and it’s like he’s standing across from a stranger.

“At least I can stop wasting money in tea I won’t drink.” Sokka says, like a six year old trying to be mean and hurt someone so he won’t have to admit he’s hurt too. “Suki’s a coffee girl too.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath from Zuko. The clouds in front of the moon move finally, and pale light shines upon him. There he is, he thinks bitter and angry and then, _there he is_. His gold eyes are watered in the edges, his jaw is set as stone and his chest heaves in a heavy way, fingers shaking as they hold his cup just shy away from breaking it.

Tui and La, he was an ass.

He had just tried to be honest, tried to make things clear and Sokka had to be a 14-year-old boy about this. His lips part to call his name, to apologize.

“Go find Suki.” Zuko says in a clear dismissal, taking the bottle of liquor and the glass from his hands, turns to walk down his stairs to storage it away. “Go tell her how you feel.”

Sokka takes a step forward nevertheless, reaches to touch his shoulder.

“Lee—”

He shrugs off his hand without turning to him, stops just a few steps away from him, in the first step of those stairs. His shoulders almost seem to be shaking, like he’s holding back more than just words.

“Go find Suki.” He repeats, but Sokka doesn’t move. This feels wrong, and he knows this feels wrong because he broke something and he just wants the chance to fix it. Instead, Lee snaps one more time. “I mean it, move it.” And disappears down the stairs, closing the door to his house behind his back.

It feels cold and hurtful and distinctively performative.

But Sokka goes.

* * *

“Sokka what the fuck?” Suki asks, frowning at him, then at the watch on the wall and then back at him like she thinks that frowning hard enough will make the situation they are in make any sense. “It’s midnight.”

“Sorry.”

He goes through half a dozen rom-coms in his head and, admittedly he’s at a disadvantage; there’s no rain, they’re not in a field of flowers, or her best friend’s wedding, or in a fancier city, he’s not trying to catch up with a train running, Sokka’s just… Swaying in her doorway with the alcohol in his bloodstream and trying to string up words, but he’s fairly certain people didn’t apologize in confessions, did they?

“Why are you here?”

This doesn’t feel like the confession scene in movies where the guy gets the girl and proceeds to have a very bland but happy life. Maybe if they were in their 30s instead of their 20s it would, people always fall in love in their 30s in the movie. Or maybe if he didn’t feel so incredibly stupid now that she opened the door, dressed in her pajamas, clearly half-asleep and cranky and not smiling at him with a bottle of brandy and glasses set for two. He should go back to The Jasmine.

“Zu- _Lee_.” He bites his tongue, curses himself in his head because he’s supposed to not know his real name though he has known it for weeks now and Zuko would be hurt as all hell if he ever found out. “ _Lee_ told me to come here.”

She arches her brow, unimpressed.

“What for?”

Oh, he felt really stupid and he really wanted to go back to the Jasmine. Tell Zuko he was an idiot and kiss liquor-flavored lips until he forgot about any and everything.

“To… Confess my love… I guess?”

Suki looks more than unimpressed now, she looks exasperated and Sokka has the impression he looks just how he feels: like an idiot.

“You’re in the wrong address then.” She deadpans, walking away from the rented small apartment’s doorway but leaving the door wide open behind her for him to follow her. He does, moves to sit on the couch, unsure, and startles when she shoves a glass of water in his hands. “Drink.”

“I’m not in the wrong address. You live here."

"And you’re in love with me, are you?” She says, arching a brow. “After knowing me for five days?”

Sokka drinks the water so he won’t say something that’s either stupid or referencing a film.

“Sokka.” She says, a half-groan half-whine that has her head tilting her head back. “We know each other for three days and I can figure out I’m not it. Apparently, it’s too much hoping you two would figure out the same.” One hand rests on as a fist against her waist and the other waves to punctuate her arguments; he drinks more water in attempts to make himself less of a target. “I went out with you two once and he looked at you like you hung the moon on the sky. He laughed at jokes no sane person would. And you? You talk about him all the time. Him, his poetry, his favorite drinks, his favorite bar— Once you started talking about his hair for ten minutes!”

“I was drunk.” He defends himself with a pout.

He is drunk now too, way more dunk than he usually gets and still less drunk than Zuko is on his best nights and he doesn’t understand how he makes that work and he is very much proving her point by thinking about him, stop, stop thinking about—

“Yes, and that’s why you don’t get to drink absinthe around me anymore.” She says, a playful smile to her lips, that small gleam of amusement to her eyes instead of a full blown spark, sits by his side on his couch and softens all together. “But you were also in love. Still are, I’d wager. Which is why I can’t understand how you don’t see it and why this moment is happening, because it’s so obvious that it hurts.”

Silence settles over them, like a leniency after a particularly hard blow, a slow wait for him to admit what he heard and it’s validity, but he doesn’t need the time and he doesn’t need the silence because Sokka knows, has known for quite a while. Because Zuko has scraps of poems on his kitchen drawer, he likes to feed turtelducks, he laughs at his jokes, he drinks to forget but he had stopped drinking when they were together, his hand is warm and his smile lights up something inside his chest that was warm and comforting and sure and Sokka feels as he looks.

“I’m an idiot.” He whispers, shoulders slumping under the realization.

“You are.”

“I’m in love with him.”

“That too.”

“Should I tell him?”

“I’ll punch you if you don’t.” She says, cheerily, plucking the glass from his hands and getting up. “Now, go tell him and let me sleep, will you?”

It feels warm and affectionate and like a command.

So, for the second time that evening, Sokka goes.

He runs like his legs will fail any moment, and if he overthinks this, they just might. His lungs burns as he passes the streets lined with bars, can recall days and dates in every one of them, runs through the cobblestones he had swayed on that first night.

How does he say it? Suki didn’t prepare him for this, but it should be his words and no one else’s. He just wished he wasn’t drunk for this.

If he had time, he could’ve picked a poem, or wrote a poem himself, but right now he just tries to keep light the overflowing truths waiting to be let out, words such as: ‘I like to lean back and listen to your laugh, I adore your smile, that you’ll let me steal the blankets as long as I cuddle you first, that you hate coffee but you’ll still have some in the kitchen to brew for me, that I hate tea and I still have some to brew for you, the way you get shy when you blush and how your nose scrunches up when I tell you a bad joke, I love that you’re the kind of nerd that could recite half a poet’s work out of memory even after fallen on your ass from tequila and that you would recite it all the same if you weren’t drunk at all, I would want to spend the night with you if your name was Lee and I would want to spend the night with you if your name was Zuko and, one last thing, I am wretchedly in love with you, so settle for me.’

The concrete turns to wood under his feet when he arrives in the docks.

Settle for me.

He doesn’t stop running.

Settle for me.

He knows all the boats in these docks now, knows their names and colors and can count how many there are in the row that leads to The Jasmine Dragon, laughs and smiles and counts: 23, 24, 25.

Settle for me.

26, 27, 28, 29.

Settle for me.

He stops.

The Jasmine… isn’t there.

Sokka backs up slighly, looks at the boats he ran by, known boats, counts them in his head and knows he’s not in the wrong place. The Jasmine is the thirtieth boat in dock five, so he is in the right place but the sailboat is not here.

Zuko is not here.

His still beats at a strong, rapid pace that hurts his ribcage, but it’s not for the same reason anymore.

_There are plenty of people who asked me the same question when I decided to leave._

Boat 36 on Dock 5 was a fishermen boat, maintained by the elderly couple who he helped carry heavy barrels to a side or another a couple times before. They’re notably grumpy and terrific gossipers and he hopes they’re there, walking towards them numbly. They are, thanks to the Spirits, setting things up for the morning fishing.

“Excuse me, sir.” He tries, and he sounds gutted. “When did the boat in Dock 5 leave?”

“Your friend’s one? A hour ago, lad.” The fisherman says, his wife gathering the nets and muttering under her breath at the other end of the boat. “Ten minutes or so after you left, I think.”

Sokka can feel the moment something withers and dies inside his chest, a something that barely a month ago was half-blooming, fluttering against his ribcage with hope. It gives a groan or a whisper as it drops, a heavy weight to the bottom of his stomach.

_Settle for me._

* * *

> **A Boy In Port Town**  
>  By Zuko Igarashi
> 
> If you were prone to love,  
>  You might have stayed.  
>  Perhaps if you valued  
>  Spontaneity over safety  
>  Then who knows?  
>  You might have, would have,  
>  But, right now, you don’t.
> 
> This is the person you are:  
>  You down another glass and  
>  Sail away that very night,  
>  You leave no time for regret  
>  And no room for goodbyes.  
>  You are your mother’s son,  
>  A kiss, some cryptic words,  
>  That’s all you’ve ever known,  
>  All which he doesn’t need to  
>  Now that you are gone.
> 
> Love is a festering wound,  
>  It burns you up with fever,  
>  Eats away your good sense.  
>  It cracks away things in you,  
>  Leaves too many unfixable dents.
> 
> Why did you expect to settle?  
>  No one place has been home  
>  Since last you were young,  
>  It was a hard lesson to learn,  
>  Do you need another one?
> 
> He was getting to close  
>  To redefining that word  
>  Plus the city was a dump  
>  And, on the other hand,  
>  There was the matter of the girl.
> 
> Why did you do this to yourself?  
>  Why did you spare so many bottles?  
>  You might arrive in another country  
>  If the alcohol doesn’t seize your muscles.
> 
> You have contempt for addresses,  
>  Little lines with too many numbers,  
>  A place you sleep regularly and  
>  Sometimes eat in, such wonders.  
>  That’s what settling reduces men to,  
>  You know what four walls will do to you.
> 
> You sail through night and sea,  
>  The sky is starless and in-compassionate,  
>  None of the stars care for our fates,  
>  And, maybe, neither should we.
> 
> Still you say ‘don’t’ when you just mean ‘settle’  
>  Maybe it’s for the best that you didn’t ask  
>  But, spirits be dammed, you wish you had,  
>  You wish you knew what answers he would have given you.
> 
> Would he? Would you?  
>  For him? For you?
> 
> You might be going insane,  
>  Torturing yourself with the query,  
>  Cigarettes just don’t burn the same.  
>  You should have asked the question,  
>  Shouldn’t have followed him home,  
>  Should have given your name,  
>  You should have just been alone.
> 
> Settle?

* * *

**EPILOGUE**

**(1 year later)**

The room is not disgustingly opulent and the people in here are not filthy rich, which is a relief.

None of that used to bother him— no, that was a lie. _Most_ of that didn't use to bother him, their entitlement and disregard for the unfairness of their wealth and how it affected others were background noises. Now, it stands out like a sore thumb, letting out pulses of latent pain that refuse to be ignored.

Or maybe he's the sore thumb.

Either way, that gap year taken of the whirlwind of camera flashes and cutthroat interactions spent in that boat spent stopping by in every other town to meet people he could actually talk to and be himself around made fitting back in high society an uncomfortable fit he had to suffer through frequently these past months, returning under his Uncle's ever kind and understanding through his several layers of subtle judgment arm and greeting.

It wouldn't do to not be able to learn how to bear discomfort and fit where he did not belong, bent in unshapely forms, he wouldn't be his father's son if he couldn't do that. Zuko had learned that lesson quickly enough, under Ozai's guidance.

Yet he hadn’t been alone, with Ty Lee and Mai waiting in the living the day after he returned, sticking by either side of him since: arms constantly interlocked, supportive hands squeezing his, encouraging bumps of shoulders, quiet nods of heads where others couldn’t see, a blossoming friendship tentatively rising from the ruins of his old life.

Visiting Azula had been what he was scared of most; that last visit had sent him running under the cover of the night for a ship and knots his hand trembled to untie, a backpack with money and clothes and paper thrown over the tiny bed and the way he had shivered exposed to the cold air. Her eyes had been dull and no recognition was to be found when he knelt in front of her and tried to talk her back into answering, into giving any indication she was in there. The stab wound was still only tender flesh and not fully healed skin, but at least the version of her who had dug a knife in-between his ribs and sternum was someone who knew him, who hated him but knew he was there.

This time, when he had walked in, she had been painting by the window, fingers gripping tight the brush and paint strokes as precise as all of her calculated plans. When she had looked at him, still hazy and distant, but with a spark of recognition that halted her brush mid-movement.

“Zuzu.” She had said and that was all it took.

He had wept like a 13 year old cradling burned flesh all over again, cried like he had a year ago as his beating heart pumped blood out of his cut and the cops dragged her unconscious body outside. Wept and clung to her as she stood still, nearly unresponsive, her still hand pressed to his back.

Zuko wouldn’t dare to leave again, not being able to see the baby steps into recovery she took with great pains to herself. Nor with Uncle’s worried gazes as he handled him with care, afraid he’d break, but with pride and joy to see him returned. Nor with the way Mai stuck closer to him than she normally would to anyone else and with how Ty Lee got more and more comfortable with touching him, from hugs to braidings of hair.

He shouldn’t have left in the first place, should have never tried to outrun himself and bury the memories with common vices he could buy at any grocery store.

( _But then he wouldn’t have met…_

 _No,_ it would have been better if he never met him either.)

Zuko’s snapped back to the present by cool fingers as Mai slides her hand into the crook of his elbow, guiding him towards the stairs so he can make his way down and to his actual book release.

It’s nice to be reminded he’s not alone right now.

“Nervous?”

“Do you want a lie or my whole life story?”

“That’s all the ‘yes’ I needed.” She declines, raising a brow at him. “You’ve done these before.”

“Not in a whole year though.”

Mai hums, tilting her head to the side in acknowledgment.

“Just don’t lose it.” Is her choice of advise and Zuko snorts so hard he hurts the back of his throat.

“I’ll try.”

She pats his shoulder just as awkwardly as he goes through any social interaction.

“Go be their sad poet sweetheart.”

“Go ignore me and hold hands with Ty Lee.”

“Sure.” She says, and almost smirks at him, almost— wait, did she _wink_? Mai can wink?! He didn’t know she could that.

And he’s alone, behind his desk, book and pens in front of him, banners with his book and face behind him, ' _Zuko Igarashi's_ _read it to burn_ ', bold letters announcing this place and this hour and the signing of books.

Zuko smiles at the small assembled crowd composed of mostly fans and some press members, crammed together in this old wooden library for his second poetry book's release, greets them kindly and warmly and jokes small quips that have then chuckling before lifting a glass of water to his mouth and drifting his eyes towards the page open in front of him nervously.

 _Poetry is like bleeding on paper_. He said once in one of the first seminars he was invited to talk into, mid-analyzing Madine Tomlinson’s How To Eat A Poem As If It’s A Mango. _It’s never gentle and you don’t ever run out of blood until you run out of breath — and no one needs to write poetry when they’re dead._

He takes the book in his hand and lifts it to better read it. The whole room goes silent with quiet expectation. His tongue wets his lips and he takes a breath, the title _To The Bone_ lays in his grasp like a goliath to be defeated, gathers courage like one would gather rain: sparsely and ending with no more than a palmfull of it. It would have to do.

It wasn’t his first poem about Sokka, and it wasn’t his last either.

_Did you think only one would satisfy?_

“I warm myself with neon-green absinthe In the ever so cold absence of you And avoid all ponderings of blame, For I know who my fingers will point to.”

The sound of camera flashes clicking fill the background, some dozens of cellphones film him too, all eyes are on him, watching and evaluating an taking notes to be spread later. But this is not him, they will not find him here if they try, they will only find poetry. It’s easier if he’s just poetry.

“I have been wisened by the ways One’s heart can break and beat on And stopped counting the days, Once the tally marks overtook my walls, But I still think of you often, Like a dog chewing bone.”

Through the small pause between one verse and another, the bell on the door rings when another person enters the bookshop. Through his peripheral vision, the man is tanned and dark haired and dressed in blue. He stops by the door, as if staring at him too (albeit more openly), then takes one step towards the crowd and Zuko keeps going.

“Do you still remember me? If you do, do you remember me well? Are the memories rose-golden, Or clouded by gray smoke and no farewell? Given that you think of those, Do you do it often or just sometimes? Those three weeks are fleeting thoughts, Or do they plague you on rewind?” His throat works around the knot in it, swallowing the emotion down as best as he can before continuing with his voice a few octaves lower, softer, near-breaking. “When your hand twitches slightly, Is it because you miss holding mine? Do you still have that three-lettered Name I gave you on your mind?”

The likeliness of one of these videos ending on his hands is great and he knows that. He wonders what his reaction would be, if he would even recognize him, link this poet surrounded by his own books with Lee and the small bookshelf on his ship, if he would even have answers for the questions he wrote down. He probably won’t, wouldn’t, but he thinks of it still.

“In some ways, thoughts are like tides And I’m very used to the mercilessness of the sea, I let the memory of you wash over me, And ponder weather to allow it to drag me under. For if the remains of your kiss Set to find me late at night And were to brush over my lips, Would I not follow you into slumber?”

Zuko’s fingers hold tighter at the edge of the book, a careful hold of his emotions less he wants more speculations all over the Internet of what could that have meant in the years of his absence. These are just words, his words, his feelings. He controls them and reads on, for just a couple more lines.

“What then, when I wake, And there’s no you to speak of? Should I pour myself another glass? Should I chase after your memory In the hollows of my skeleton You have come to reside on? Should I gnaw myself entirely, For the smallest scraps of you, Like a dog, to the bone?”

He closes the book as soon as the last words are out of his lips, like wind or a parting kiss, and stops being poetry and becomes Zuko again.

Everyone is staring, pictures are being take and he’s being recorded and it’s of him now, not poetry. He can be found now, skinny and tall and with a scarred face, standing unsurely in front of a crowd who wants to read what this broken man has to say.

His manager, Shyu, comes to his rescue, placing a hand to his shoulder and smiling first at him then at the room at large.

“The autograph session will begin shortly.”

He ducks his head and takes the break while people are being organized into a line, sitting behind the desk and checking his phone for a thumbs up emoji from Mai and overly supportive texts from Ty Lee and Uncle.

A pen is placed in his hand and the line begins moving.

Writing his name again is another tricky thing; it had been goof to be Lee, not just because he didn’t have to be with rich people who couldn’t care less, but because Lee had no name and no family and nothing to outrun. It helps if he tries to think he’s reclaiming his lat name from the bloody atrocities and the shame his father put it through every time he writes it.

Zuko Igarashi. Zuko Igarashi. Zuko Igarashi.

He writes it at least twenty times before he feels like himself again, and twenty four before:

“That was beautiful.” A girl says, brown-haired and brown eyed, only slightly younger than him and so remarkably alike Song as she passes him her copy of his poetry book. “Did— Could you please sign it to Lianne? Thank you so much— Did you write it for someone?”

The smile comes as if it's punched out of him: natural and genuine, fond but melancholic. Such are the memories of Sokka he folded in fine cloth and took with him for a lifetime.

“Yes, I did.” Zuko says, much less pleasant and much more authentic than in the small talk between the other fans had been. “I'm not sure he read it though.”

“I hope he has.” Lianne says, smiles encouragingly at him.

“I hope so too.” He says, honestly, handing the book back to her. “Thank you.”

The thought of Sokka, who valiantly suffered though his impromptu poetry recitals with quietly loud opinions on the vastness of his repertoire, willingly reading his is inherently hilarious to Zuko. Or at least he trained himself to laugh about it, so the ghost pain of never having something he yearned for come true would be bearable.

The yearning was cut short with the loud sound of a book (one of his books) being thrown in the desk in front of him.

“He did.” The rude stranger says, in a voice so painfully familiar it has Zuko freezing in place, eyes trailed on the book ahead of him, at the sheet of paper by _A Boy In Port Town_ 's, a printed poem that he didn't write and didn't name with a name under it that's not his, he did not write it. “He thought it was beautiful too." He reads the first line at the same time the voice says. “The answer was 'yes', you know?”

He lowers the pen and doesn’t dare to look up, pulling his book closer and the slip of paper in it even more so. He reads it over and over again, feels his eyes water with tears and his phone buzz in his pocket with text either from Mai or Ty Lee or Shyu or Uncle which means he’s probably being rereading this for a long time, but he doesn’t bother opening them or reassuring anyone because… He feels like sobbing or laughing or smiling and his heart could burst if he only dared to hope and look up, but he _can’t_.

This is all he ever wanted to hear, all he never hoped to read, and if he looks up and this name is just a coincidence and his voice is just a trick of memory, and his face is not the one he wants to look, what will he feel then? It took 32 poems to be almost okay with never seeing him again, how many more will it take if this isn’t him?

“Zuko?” The same voice calls, _his voice_ , but calling him through a name he had never given him no matter how many times he asked. A tanned hand reaches for him, over the table and over the books and over two different poems, the last sentence of one and the first sentence of the second, ‘ _Settle?_ ’ and ‘ _The answer was yes_ ’. Zuko reaches for it, as warm as he remember, and it holds him with no hesitation. “It’s me. It’s me, I promise.” He reassures, thumb caressing pale knuckles and Zuko sniffles and allows himself to smile. “Mind looking at me? I haven’t seen you in a while… Real-life seeing you, that is.”

He was the man who had come in late, dressed in a dark blue jacket and whites and greys under it. His hair grew in the sides, but he still has it pulled back in a wolftail, and his eyes are the same shade of blue he remembers, alight by a quiet joy Zuko could understand, his face has been cleanly shaved recently and Zuko feels somewhere in-between having been punched in the stomach and breathing after too long under water.

That’s undeniably him.

“There you are.” He says, as gentle as his fingers had been the first time caressing the outlines of his scar, smiling as brightly as he had the first time they had kissed on The Jasmine. “You never looked like a Lee.”

There were people staring and pictures being take and he’s being recorded and it’s of him and of poetry at the same time, because this is a moment he will write countless words over, trying to make it eternal. He can be found, he knows, through ever gaze and picture and video, and by a tanned hand, holding onto his, by a man with blue eyes and a bright smile he never thought he would see again and he couldn’t quite mind being found.

His name burned more familiar then absinthe or brandy or whiskey or any liquor could ever have. It leaves his mouth in a quiet, wonder struck breath, lighter than smoke or oxygen.

“ _Sokka._ ”

Zuko missed saying it.

* * *

> **Settle**  
>  By Sokka Arnaittuq
> 
> The answer was ‘yes’.  
>  I would have told you as much  
>  If I had known better then,  
>  On the 5th row, 30th spot,  
>  With you telling me not  
>  To settle for someone like you.
> 
> I didn’t then, but I know it now  
>  Like I know the name of the sea  
>  And of the moon and a man  
>  Who unselfishly gave me away,  
>  Like how I can read the regret  
>  Written in your every sentence,  
>  Every paragraph, every poem;  
>  But I do know better now.
> 
> If I were to ask, as I crave to,  
>  With a shit poem and a  
>  Couple of lies to admit to,  
>  A name you never told me  
>  Familiar on my tongue,  
>  If I could find you one more time,  
>  Would you be willing to listen?  
>  Would I be able to make you stay?
> 
> Would you settle for me?  
>  Because I would for you.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> did I have to write all of that original poetry for a one shot? probably not. do I regret it? no.
> 
> would i mind some comments to cheer a fellow writer on or to say which poem did you like more? also no.
> 
> curious and would like to have little updates and see when i publish new works in case you liked this fic? you can always find me in tumblr @amatchforyourmadness!
> 
> 10/10/2020 - We now have art of this fic!!!! Check out terracyte's most lovely [art](https://terracyte.tumblr.com/post/631607310751498240/one-of-my-favorite-scenes-from-the-absolutely) for a heartwarming depiction of the epilogue!


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